A Smart City Vision defines the goals you want to reach as a city

• a vision needs to build on the unique features of a city (society, culture, history, economy etc.) and state bold goals for a future development.
• this does not have to be related to smart tech
• but it’s important to define clear goals for the future and to have an idea, of how they can be achieved
• a true vision for your city needs to be developed in a dialogue within your city
• ideally you get citizens, local businesses and research on board when developing your vision and finding ways to translate it into measures.

Examples for existing Smart Cities

Writing Implementation Strategies and Plans

Implementation Plans and Strategies help you strategically implement the Smart City Solutions you need.

A good smart city strategy needs to tackle the urban transformation on four different levels in an integrated way:

Core Elements:

Diagnosis

Guiding Policy

Coherent Actions

We are supporting the development of the Brainport Smart District in Helmond, The Netherlands – planned to be the smartest district in the world by 2022.

Smart City Developments are built on strong local partnerships. A community of innovators
and entrepreneurs is needed to come-up with solutions that help your city improve and thrive
– at the same time it needs the citizenry and the municipality as their representative to make sure,
money is spend in the best public interest.

Building strong local partnerships is not an easy task – it needs to balance different interests and goals.
External guidance and innovation impulses are therefore needed to set-up and manage
a local innovation ecosystem. We support you in identifying the right initiatives and partners to follow a
process of sustainable and long-term growth e.g. by organizing inspirational workshops with presentations
and by managing the process of local project development and implementation.

You can download a report we were involved in from SmartImpact here

The city administration plays a crucial role and can do a lot to boost
the improvement of urban life.

The vast majority of Smart City Projects is cross-sectoral – involving
different departments and staff from many different backgrounds in your
city administration.
Efficiently implementing solutions requires an efficient organisation.

There is no one-size fits all solution but there are
generic governance structure that have proven to be successful.

Within CityLabs, the aim is to develop an over-arching systemic understanding of how the city functions.
Working in close collaboration with local stakeholders, the interdisciplinary research team uses quantitative
and qualitative methods to identify key challenges and areas for intervention.
Based on the findings, an integrated roadmap to achieve smarter and more sustainable urban development
is developed collaboratively with the city. BABLE as a spin-off from the
Morgenstadt Innovation Network offers the City Labs together with experts from Morgenstadt and Fraunhofer.

Challenge:

• Hard for cities to know where to start
• Align activities across different departments
• Understand how the system needs to be analysed, conceived and improved
• Develop a coherent roadmap
• How to break goals down into actions on the right level – not just technology but also governance and financing level.
• Prioritising hierarchical needs

References

SWOT analysis for cities

For a smaller scale and rather quick analysis we offer a SWOT screening of your city, naming however not quantifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The analysis is based on workshops and interviews with experienced personnel from the city and relevant partners as well as a review of existing documents.