Investigating the entrepreneurial perspective in smart city studies

Although the concept of smart cities has been largely discussed in the literature for over almost three decades, there is still a need to better understand the entrepreneurial aspects surrounding smart cities. This study aims to explore the evolutionary trends of research in the field of Smart Cities, and specifically, to unveil the entrepreneurial aspects prevailing in the literature. With the support of bibliometric analysis and social network analysis tools this paper identifies the foundations and most active areas on smart cities research over the past 20 years. It also scrutinizes and highlights the entrepreneurial aspects prevailing in the smart cities body of knowledge. It provides a critique of the current state-of–the-art of entrepreneurial research in the smart cities future research directions by analyzing the collaboration among the authors and the relation between the knowledge creation and the impact of its results. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.