The book offers new perspectives on innovation management, focusing on big data, emerging technologies, and smart cities. Specifically, this book explores the potential of big data, emphasizing data-driven insights for effective decision-making and management of innovation in smart city projects. The book includes a compelling case study of a large international pilot that successfully utilized data-driven insights to create smart urban infrastructures. Furthermore, the book introduces a novel approach to managing emerging technologies by utilizing patents as valuable data sources. By analyzing a sample of 6,589 patents from 2016 to 2021 in the smart cities domain the book empirically examines the dynamics and trends of the digital twins' technology emergence. Finally, exploring the transformative potential of emerging technologies, the book delves into the context of smart hotels. By employing sentiment analysis and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method, the book analyzes a comprehensive collection of 19,585 reviews from various online platforms, revealing the underlying structure and key characteristics of smart hotels.

Maria Chiara Di Guardo is a Professor of Innovation Management and Organization Studies at the University of Cagliari (Italy). She is also Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre (CREA-UniCa), and Director of the CLab-UniCa at the same university. Her research focused on how to organize efficiently the innovation process as well as the relationship between innovation and entrepreneurship.

Elona Marku is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari (Italy) and a research fellow at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre at the same university. She also was a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School (Columbia University, New York), Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation (University of California, Berkeley), Bayes Business School (City University, London), and Warwick Business School (University of Warwick).

Maryia Zaitsava is an Assistant Professor in Organization Studies at the Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari (Italy). She was a visiting scholar at the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation (University of California, Berkeley) and Liverpool Business School (Liverpool John Moores University, UK). She also has worked as a business consultant for high-tech smart cities projects.