How do academic smart city centres operate to create and deliver their intended services to smart city stakeholders?

We found that the centres that are more successful in diversifying their value propositions and value financing, and extending their value networks beyond the academic community, tend to have more stable financial situations (p. 11).

In our article “How do academic smart city centres operate in complex environments? A business model perspective” (Ghanbari, Soe, Toiskallio and Mora 2024), published by Cities (Volume 152, September 2024), we show that with administrative support and facilities from the institution smart city centres are part of, typically university, they keep their thematic scope wide enough to serve public authorities in their knowledge capacity issues and private companies in their precise needs.

In some cases, their near connection to their mother university connects them also to students. Usually, the centres also facilitate wide specialist networks, and they operate at least in many countries, if not globally.

This versatility also enables successful smart city centres to get vital funding from many sources.

This is not an easy task, which is one reason for the rather small number of explicitly smart-city–focused R&I units. It can also happen that smart city units, famous based on their academic publications, are after all just a few people around their professor, suffering from funding cuts. 

Method and limitations

Since the topic of this article and number of the actual smart city centres are rare and small, an explorative approach was needed to support the main lens of the study that was the business models of the centres.

Thus, semi-structured in-depth online interviews were a crucial source for us, on top of the online-questionnaire and public information from the centres’ websites. 

After all, the data of our study could have been larger and deeper. We never visited nor worked in our target units, but interviewed one or two persons in a leading position in that unit.

We still do not know if our target centres have their own building or entrance, or just a roll-up in the hall-way in front of professor’s door. Culturally, our study was also restricted to centres using English as their main language, leaving thus South-America and many parts of Asia out of scope. So, more studies dealing with this topic really are needed. 

Read the full paper “How do academic smart city centres operate in complex environments? A business model perspective” (Hadi Ghanbari, Ralf-Martin Soe, Kalle Toiskallio, Luca Mora). Cities, Volume 152,
2024