This study aims to address strategies, models, and the motivation behind smart cities by analyzing two smart city project cases in medium-sized cities, i.e., Gimpo and Namyangju in South Korea. The case of Smartopia Gimpo represents a top-down, infrastructure-focused smart city innovation that invested in building state-of-the-art big data infrastructure for crime prevention, traffic alleviation, environmental preservation, and disaster management. On the other hand, Namyangju 4.0 represents a strategy focused on internal process innovation through extensive employee training and education regarding smart city concepts and emphasizing data-driven (rather than infrastructure-driven) policy decision making. This study explores two smart city strategies and how they resulted in distinctively different outcomes. We found that instilling a culture of innovation through the training of government managers and frontline workers is a critical component in achieving a holistic and sustainable smart city transformation that can survive leadership changes.

Unlike the practices of contracting out and privatization, which reduce public sector involvement and responsibility in service provision, public entrepreneurial practices may be one of the best ways to improve government performance and meet citizens’ demand efficiently and effectively. This study examines the relationships between organizational characteristics and public entrepreneurship in order to provide empirical support for entrepreneurial practices in state governments in the United States. The study found that most organizational characteristics influence the entrepreneurial behaviors defined as risk-taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness. The findings suggest that organizational structures and strategies in the public sector need to be adjusted to stimulate entrepreneurial activities and culture through opportunity-driven management.

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a transformative force in public service delivery, promising improved efficiency and responsiveness to citizens’ needs, so it is essential to understand the functional factors that influence citizens’ adoption and intention to continue using such services. Drawing on the technology acceptance model, this study investigates the influence of six functional factors, namely, usefulness, ease of use, service reliability, service quality, responsiveness, and security, on the continued use of AI-enabled public services through the mediating effect of user satisfaction. Data were collected from an online survey of AI-enabled public services in Korea during the summer of 2021, and causal mediation analysis was conducted to examine these relationships. The results indicate that usefulness, service reliability, and security significantly influenced users’ intent to continue using AI-based services. Furthermore, causal mediation analysis confirmed that the five components of AI public services—usefulness, service reliability, service quality, responsiveness, and security—had significant effects on the continued use of AI-enabled service platforms, with user satisfaction playing a mediating role in the relationships. The main functional factors can lead to higher levels of satisfaction, and this ultimately drives the sustained adoption and continued use of AI-enabled public services by citizens.

Public sector entrepreneurship is an approach to reinventing government that has been applied in public and nonprofit settings to stimulate better performance. The mind-set of public entrepreneurship (i.e., risk-taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness) is expected to cultivate more competitive and productive environments in organizations. This study examines the effects of public entrepreneurial characteristics on organizational performance in 296 U.S. state agencies. The results indicate that taking risks, being innovative, and being proactive contribute positively to organizational performance. Proactiveness is the most influential factor of the three for achieving improved performance. The results suggest that state governments can better leverage their strategies and resources, become more action oriented and opportunity driven, and take advantage of cutting-edge opportunities by adopting entrepreneurial characteristics.

The quality movement in the United States has been characterized as an impetus for organizational effectiveness and responsiveness since the late 1970s. ‘Quality’ can be a subjective term as each organization has its own definition and boundaries. Three emphases are evident in the field of quality improvement: quality circles, total quality management, and citizen satisfaction. Practices of quality improvement in the public sector have been driven by demands from citizens for more effective services, outcomes that require the implementation of suitable quality models and standards. Points for practitioners This article presents major intellectual trends in the practice of service quality improvement. Practitioners will be able to comprehend the most fundamental concepts of ‘what is public service quality improvement’. Practitioners will also obtain useful insights into defining quality criteria and assessing organizational improvement models based on substantive principles of quality management for promoting organizational effectiveness and responsiveness.