Leadership for responsible digital innovation in the built environment: a socio-technical review for re-establishing competencies

Digitalisation in cities offers new opportunities and challenges for city planners and managers to re-shape their roles and create public value through responsible innovation. However, there is a lack of understanding of the competency requirements to foster leadership capacity for digital innovation with social coherence and responsibility. Based on a socio-technical perspective, this paper presents a multi- and inter-disciplinary framework to identify and evaluate the competencies necessary for leading digital innovation in the built environment. The framework incorporates three dimensions: digital and technical, governance and management, and ethical and responsible innovation. A review of existing competency frameworks for digitalisation in the urban built environment is presented to identify competency gaps across the three dimensions. The results show that existing frameworks rarely strive for comprehensiveness and are limited in their scope to certain competencies along a single dimension. In addition, studies addressing the need for multi- and inter-disciplinary competencies across the three dimensions are lacking. The paper thus demonstrates that our three-pronged framework is a useful and much needed tool to identify competency requirements for local public, private and community stakeholders to steer place-based digital innovation and ensure public value creation.