Academic space is needed amid the perverse problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To share visions, projects, and new ideas related to technology in government. Public problems must be addressed through advances in digital government, public innovation, and emerging technologies.

The objective of the First International Innovation and Smart Government Conference is to foster cutting-edge research on the topics of public innovation, smart government, public governance, government data, internet access, and changes in government organizations.

It seeks to unite the efforts of academics in multidisciplinary groups related to information systems, data science, public administration, e-government, artificial intelligence, among others, to produce alternatives to the problems shared by governments around the world.

This effort is dedicated to attracting research from Latin America due to its geographical proximity and seeks to become a reference in Smart government and Public Innovation. It highlights academic contributions in cutting-edge research topics and practical contributions to solving shared problems in the region and areas where technology and government practice converge.

This year, the congress is focused on proposing solutions to complex problems (Paquet and Scherez, 2021) and wicked problems. From generating theoretical explanations, reference frameworks, key constructs that allow understanding the problems and proposing practical and tangible solutions for governments.

This first edition of the First International Innovation and Smart Government Conference focuses on understanding the organizational challenges public administrations face at all levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how to face the short and medium-term challenges.These challenges are complex because they imply drastic changes in public organizations that rethink their existence, work dynamics, and impact on their communities and countries. These challenges, such as repairing the social tissue are fragmented by losing lives and jobs and have broken cultural and ideological structures by being locked in for so many months.

The great challenge of governing the social media platforms whose synergy has transformed: social interactions, citizen participation, the government-citizen relationship, and families, young people, professionals, and political employees adapt to new communication and collaboration dynamics, which threatens to become virtual realities through new technologies such as the Metaverse.

The economic challenges to repair the severe economic, distribution, and supply chain damage, loss of jobs, closure of industries facing more challenging competitive conditions, and deal with disjointed governments.The crucial challenges in health systems require structural, comprehensive reforms that contain the intensive use of data, the revolution of machines to understand new viruses, attend patients with extreme care, and require technologies to generate vaccines and prevent epidemics.

Finally, the challenges of information inequality and access to public data involve new public knowledge systems in the face of the sustainable energy revolution. These changes brought the adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain will be decisive in understanding the new configuration between government, technology, and society in the 21st century.

Objective