Smart Cities as Innovation Ecosystems sustained by the Future Internet

The White Paper focuses on how European cities are currently developing strategies towards becoming "smarter cities" and the lessons we can draw for the future. Such strategies are based on an assessment of the future needs of cities and innovative usages of ICTs embodied in the broadband Internet and Internet-based applications now and foreseen for the future. These strategies are also based on a new understanding of innovation, grounded in the concept of open innovation ecosystems, global innovation chains, and on citizens' empowerment for shaping innovation and urban development. This White Paper is one of the main outcomes of the FIREBALL project (www.fireball4smartcities.eu), a Coordination Action within the 7th Framework Programme for ICT, running in the period 2010-2012. The aim of FIREBALL is to bring together communities and stakeholders who are active in three areas: (1) research and experimentation on the Future Internet (FIRE); (2) open and user-driven innovation (Living Labs); and (3) urban development. The goal is to develop a common vision and a common view on how the different approaches, methodologies, policies and technologies in these areas can be aligned to boost innovation and socio-economic development of cities. The White Paper has explored the landscape of "smart cities" as environments of open and user driven innovation sustained by Future Internet technologies and services. Smart cities are also seen as environments enabled by advanced ICT infrastructure for testing and validating current Future Internet research and experimentation. Overall, the smart city is built upon a triangle of "City" - "Open Innovation Ecosystems" - "Future Internet" components. The White Paper explores also how cities and urban areas represent a critical mass when it comes to shaping the demand for advanced Internet-based services in large-scale testing and validation. Shaping this demand informs ongoing research, experimentation and deployment activities related to Future Internet testbeds, and helps establishing a dialogue between the different communities involved in the development of the future Internet and user-driven environments, to form partnerships and assess social and economic benefits and discovery of migration paths at early stages. Based on a holistic instead of technology merely driven perspective on smart cities, we consider necessary to revisit the concept of the Smart City itself. The concept of the smart city that emerges from FIREBALL can be summarized as follows: "The smart city concept is multi-dimensional. It is a future scenario (what to achieve), even more it is an urban development strategy (how to achieve it). It focuses on how (Internet-related) technologies enhance the lives of citizens. This should not be interpreted as drawing the smart city technology scenario. Rather, the smart city is how citizens are shaping the city in using this technology, and how citizens are enabled to do so. The smart city is about how people are empowered, through using technology, for contributing to urban change and realizing their ambitions. The smart city provides the conditions and resources for change. In this sense, the smart city is an urban laboratory, an urban innovation ecosystem, a living lab, an agent of change. Much less do we see a smart city in terms of a Ranking. This ranking is a moment in time, a superficial result of underlying changes, not the mechanism of transformation. The smart city is the engine of transformation, a generator of solutions for wicked problems, it is how the city is behaving smart."