The innovation system developed through Macau’s smart city initiatives “is ambitious, complex, but still seeking complementarity”
The Macau Government first raised the idea of building a “smart city” in the 2016 Policy Address [“to initiate studies on a plan for the development of the new era of big data for Macau to become a smart city,” noted Chui Sai On].
A decade has since passed — ample time for an initial assessment.
That is precisely what an international team of researchers set out to do in the paper Realizing Innovation and Sustainability: A Case Study of Macau’s Smart City Development Capabilities (SAR), published online in 2023.
The five authors begin by noting that Macau “have embarked on an ambitious journey to promote innovation and sustainability through smart city development.”
Their findings suggest that “The study shows that organizations in Macau developed public-sector and associated private-sector innovation and entrepreneurship in its smart city initiatives, through developing distinct sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities for innovation.”
In particular, “Macau’s unique institutional contexts resulted in local associations playing indispensable roles in smart city coordination and governance,” wrote Yujia He (University of Kentucky, USA), Felix Tan and Carmen Leong (both from UNSW, Australia), Jingbo Huang, and Don Rodney Ong Junio (both from the United Nations University Institute, Macau). “The study also provides evidence for a shift from the binary thinking of public-private partnerships often seen in the promotion of smart cities, to more dynamic thinking of networked organizations forging different and complementary market and non-market linkages in the smart city as an innovation system.”
Potential market domination by Alibaba and its affiliates
Not everything has progressed smoothly over the past decade, the authors note.
“This research also has practical implications on how governments can stimulate progress toward innovation in smart city development. The study shows that despite notable progress, players within Macau’s innovation system still struggle to provide and receive complementary support from other players.”
They further state that “the uneven power relationship among players within the system, shown in the example of the government’s collaboration with Alibaba Cloud resulting in local firms’ wariness of potential market domination by Alibaba and its affiliates, also raises practical questions, such as how governments continue partnerships with such non-local private platform companies while balancing the interests of local players that aim to support a local technological base for innovation.”
In short, while “the innovation system developed through Macau’s smart city initiatives is ambitious, [and] complex,” it remains “seeking complementarity.” Complementarity, the authors explain, refers to achieving synergy by aligning more effectively with the environment and relevant stakeholders.
Local companies face barriers in talent recruitment and retention
“Unfortunately, in the case of Macau, this cycle of providing and receiving complementarity in the ecosystem is not yet complete,” and the authors devote a section of the paper to “critically assesses areas in need of improvement.”
They first observe that “local companies face barriers in talent recruitment and retention, regulatory compliance, and infrastructure, and need other complementary support from the government and other stakeholders.”
The authors cite Macau Pass, one of the city’s most successful start-ups, as an example: “while the company was keen on expansion, it struggled to find adequate local technology talent and had to work with external tech teams in nearby GBA cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai to build and serve new services.”
At the same time, changes in government regulation “was also slow to respond to technological and business demand.” In terms of internet connectivity, greater investment in high-speed broadband infrastructure would also be beneficial.
He, Tan, Leong, Huang, and Ong Junio further argue that “citizen participation in smart city initiatives and innovation needs to be amplified” and that “efforts are needed to strengthen the flows of knowledge of relevant clients between universities and other R&D players.”
As a SAR, Macau enjoys a special status within China’s university research funding system and hosts four national laboratories that receive prestigious funding and employ leading researchers, including the State Key Laboratory for the Internet of Things for Smart Cities, established by the University of Macau in 2018.
However, local technology companies and incubators report limited access to these university-based R&D programmes and projects. As one local start-up incubator attested, “very few people know what they (national labs in universities) are capable of, their policies, and how they could help local companies… the government can help bridge the gap between the labs and the start-up community.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): João Paulo Meneses
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: Macau Business, 14.04.2026
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