Nursery city innovation: A CELL framework

How can innovative cities be cultivated and fertilized? Embracing and reframing insights from multidisciplinary academic discourse, we conceptualize three paired tensional dimensions, namely, the human-society, the market-government and the global-local tensions, to form a six-I city innovation framework. Also termed a CELL framework, the six I-related key elements are: human intelligence, societal incentives, government involvement, market inclination, global integration and local interconnection. Taking a holistic view, the set of collective and interdependent institutional elements can serve to analyze the development of city innovation. The key assertion of the study is that a city’s innovative ecosystem can be built up, and, more importantly, via configuring key institutional arrangements.