Scaling Smart City Projects - From Individual Pilots towards a Common Strategy of Industry Emergence

Enhancing Swiss Smart Cities: Tackling the Challenges of Expansion

The SPICE project was part of the National Research Programme on “Digital Transformation” (NRP 77). It considered the Smart City (SC) concept a means to enable social and technological innovations that increase the resource efficiency and quality of life in Swiss cities as digitalization progresses.

Whereas various cities had already launched initial pilot projects before, scaling these solutions to the entire city or other cities tended to pose major challenges to administrations and companies. SPICE investigated the reasons for these problems and how they can be overcome. SPICE analyzed challenges at the level of citizen involvement, the business models of companies, and the structures of the emerging SC sector.

Creating common ground through integrated business model framework

With SPICE, we analyzed and conceptualized smart city initiatives from a business model perspective. The business model lens allowed us to assess the economic and managerial viability of current developments in Swiss smart cities and derive concrete implications for the scaling of smart city endeavors.

Our research also aimed at promoting the “triple bottom line” concept – environmental, social, and economic value alongside each other – in business model thinking.

Finally, we addressed the challenge that public and private actors typically lack a “common language” to talk about business models and that their difficulties to communicate about business models impede the collaborative creation of smart- city services.

We therefore developed an integrated business model framework that takes specific interests, customs, and needs of both actor groups into account.