29 Apr How to strategize Smart Cities? 6 elements of success

How to strategize Smart Cities? A Smart City strategy can help to overcome the challenges, but only if it is carefully and strategically thought out.

To a greater or lesser extent, cities are facing similar problems:

• Climate change
• Pollution in the city
• Water or energy management
• Rapid urbanization
• Rapidly evolving technology
• Mobility challenges
• Attracting global talent to improve their competitiveness. 

This is why we must follow a strategy and a strategy focus on the following suggestions*:

Please note that these insights are from the Smart Cities Innovation Accelerator in Melbourne 2019.

How to strategize Smart Cities.

Pillars of a city.

According to this accelerator a Smart City strategy must contain:

• Digital Strategy: Principles-based roadmap on how the city will approach digital and technology projects.
• Strategic Documents: A document that summarizes the desired outcomes (sustainability, mobility, governance…). It will depend on the objectives that the city wants to achieve in order to become a Smart City.
• Resiliency Strategy: Here, we will focus on the vulnerabilities of cities. The city’s problems will be defined in order to solve them. 
• Tech/Startup Plan: Knowledge of the city’s tech and startup ecosystem that will contribute to the success of the smart city strategy.

Governance Model.

A single governance model for a strategy is not yet well defined. However, there is a need for a department or a unit within the city council in question to search for, analyze and find solutions to the problems of the city.

There are many governance models that a city can choose from. It is therefore important for cities to research what models exist and which ones work best for each city.

Focus on citizens.

A smart city strategy must be citizen-centric. This is why we at FIWOO have developed an IoT-Editor platform which allows users to create any entity within the whole system without the need for computer knowledge.

This involves working with citizens and communities to identify the “menu of challenges”, i.e. the issues that are most important to the city’s residents.

See Where Technology Fits In.

Once you have listened to the citizen and their real problems, only then do you bring to the table the technology that is going to help you solve those problems.

You have to really consider what the city needs, what the citizens want and how that technology would benefit and impact people.

Collaborative Approach.

The city’s challenges, as we noted at the beginning of the blogpost, are common. That is why they cannot be solved by one city alone.

Similarly, the UN Global Compact runs a cities programme to try to bring the private sector together with cities to find common solutions to the challenges, and then find investments so that those solutions can be implemented on the ground.

Collaboration is key to the success of a smart city strategy. However, the city and its citizens must always have an independent role at the centre of the strategy.

And last “Learn & Share”.

This is the last and one of the key points. We cannot move forward without learning from mistakes, without sharing successes. Only in this way will cities succeed in moving forward into a new world full of innovation.

More doubts?

Do you want to find out more about our platform? If you’d like more information, you can request a demo or more information by contacting us via email info@fiwoo.eu or by sending the following form: