Innovative Business Models for the Future Smart City

Abstract

This paper examines how to outline and adopt innovative business models for the Smart Cities of the future. Smart Cities are intelligent and efficient communities and ecosystems employing digital technologies to respond a growing waste of resources, unsustainable environmental impact, and inefficiency in traditional processes. Considering the greatest benefits of Smart Cities on economies, societies, and environment, many countries have now introduced national Smart City projects in order to transform life, improve business operations and market competitiveness. However, despite growing interests towards Smart Cities, it remains still difficult to adopt this paradigm due to digital transformation, interaction strategies, social and cultural problems. Therefore, this paper aims to break down the barriers to these problems and support the literature and management to understand how to implement profitable business models for Smart Cities of the future. Specifically, we identify four main areas characterizing Smart Cities (i.e., Smart Mobility, Smart Living, Smart Energy, and Smart Public Ecosystems) where digital technologies have shown greater progress with large savings. For each area, multiple case studies have been discussed and Business Model Canvases have been developed for generalizing effective methodological approaches toward efficient implementation of Smart City paradigm. Results are threefold. As for digital transformation problems, we show how digital technologies (e.g., Cloud, IoT, Big Data and AI) are applied profitably through innovative business models; as for interaction strategies problems we indicate how to organize innovative ecosystems involving public and private actors to promote Smart Cities; as for social and cultural problems we delineate change management and communication practices useful to instill in all stakeholders a culture towards the Smart City. With these findings the paper aims at enriching scientific knowledge about the Smart City Paradigm by means of a business model perspective and to offer public administrations insightful guidelines for the transition toward Smart Cities.