Abstract
Due to today’s great societal challenges, such as climate change, demographic boom, resource scarcity, urban settlements find themselves trained in a tense race of reforming their urban development strategies. Turning cities into smart settlements, by improving their waste management and energy consumption seems like the only viable solution for a prosperous and sustainable future. Moreover, statistics show that smart cities create an auspicious environment for the establishment of start-up, as they provide incentives for citizens with creative and entrepreneurial skills. Accordingly, the objective of the current study is twofold: in the first instance, we would like to prove the existence of a causal link between the level of smart orientation in a city and the spread of start-ups, namely, the smarter the city, the bigger the number of start-ups, and vice versa by choosing as our case study, a city from the North-Western development region of Romania, Oradea; secondly, we stress, that the promotion of a collaborative governance model by the city leadership, involving all the stakeholders in the decision-making process enables smart orientation within a city.