Abstract
A growing number of smart-city initiatives (SCIs) around the world seek to develop innovative solutions to transform cities to more sustainable places. The economic attractiveness of these initiatives – and ultimately the amount of environmental and social value they create – depends on their business model (BM). However, in reality we observe only some of the smart city services are paid by customers while others are free of charge. While this observation is a blind spot in extant research we ask: What configurations of smart city BM exist that customers are paying for vs. that are free of charge for customers? To address these research questions, we build on literature covering the smart city (SC) concept as well as existing research on SC business models. The paper applies a crisp-set QCA approach to examine 193 SCIs in Switzerland. Our results reveal two configurational models comprising five BM configurations. We contribute to explain and analyze the diversity of SCIs as well as the causal complexity of SC BMs.
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