If you aspire to be a Smart City what is the single highest value activity you can do? One of these perhaps?

1. Develop a Smart City Strategic Plan?
2. Consult customers/citizens?
3. Begin an Open Data project?
4. Develop a privacy and data management plan?
5. Copy best practice from another Smart City?
6. Purchase relevant guides and standards?
7. Develop a business case?

The correct answer is none of the above. These are all good things you should do that you’ll find in most Smart City handbooks, but none are the highest-value activity that you should be doing. Here’s why.

Aliens come to town

Imagine you are a builder. One day a friendly alien arrives and gifts you a new building tool. This tool enables you to easily cut and fuse different materials together. It does away with the need for nails, screws, welds and associated tools saws, hammers, nail guns, screw drivers, welding and glue guns. Furthermore it enables you to create new shapes and combine materials such as rock and wood in ways that could not be done before. So, armed with this great device, do you:

1. Replace the existing tools with the new one then carry on as before?
2. Look for someone else to copy who has the same tool?
3. Give the tool to someone else who can innovate better than you.
4. Find a ‘problem’ the new tool will solve?
5. Become a fan of ‘alien tools’ and promote them to anyone who will listen?
6. Based on existing house designs, rethink how you should now build those houses?
7. Sit down with an architect and brainstorm how house could be redesigned given the powers of the new tool?

All these options are analogous to what happens in the Smart City. In the Smart City case the new alien tools are various advances in data and technology. These include new data, and new sources of data (e.g. sensors, mobile phones, citizens, open data). The advances include new models and analytics such as artificial intelligence, digital twins and (potentially) new ways of securing data such as block-chain. Just like the alien tool, the smart city tool set is revolutionary. Given this paradigm-shifting capability what do we do with it?

	Alien Tool Analogy	Smart City Equivalent	Benefits
1	Replace existing tools and carry on as before…	Digital transformation. Business-as-usual with smart city bling added.	Some productivity and efficiency benefits.
2	Look for someone else to copy…	Copy the ‘best-practice’ of other new tool pioneers.	Limited. The tools are new for them too.
3	Give the tool to someone who can innovate better than you.	Open data strategy, i.e. release the data and let others innovate.	Limited, because you are an expert user in your domain you should be embedded in the creative innovation process.
4	Find the ‘problem’ the new tool will solve.	‘Best practice’ is Smart Cities are about solving ‘customer problems’ [it’s not!]. Consult customers about their problems.	Limited because in this case the tool is not ‘solving a problem’ but creating an ‘opportunity’ to do things differently.
5	Become a fan of the alien tool	Data fans. The Smart City domain is full of data fans who drive the thinking and the dialogue down some strange paths!	Good when solving tool-related challenges. Very bad when data fandom drives overall Smart City thinking and dialogue. [This is a major problem in Smart Cities]
6	Based on existing house designs, rethink how you should now build those houses.	Digital transformation with process redesign.	Productivity and efficiency benefits. Better customer/user experience.
7	Brainstorm how houses might be redesigned…	Almost non-existent. Somebody else’s job!	Massive benefits and the reason why the author is writing this chapter!

New tools of data and technology provide us with the unique opportunity to rethink everything! From the aspirations, vision and goals of the city; to new levels of excellence of customer and citizen experience; to new levels of excellence in city operations; how we design, build and maintain cities. We have the opportunity to brainstorm, design and create new processes and experience. We have the opportunity to meet our obligation to design for a truly sustainable, resilient and liveable future and head off potential catastrophic outcomes.

The Smart Cities movement is truly a revolution in what can be achieved; all enabled by the ‘alien’ tools of new advances in data and technology.

But the main game is not data and technology. It’s creating better cities and indeed a better world.

The main game is not data and technology.

So what is the highest value Smart City activity?

The highest value Smart City activity is the creative process where we rethink our expectations, practices and experiences of our cities, places and communities. And you should be part of it. Why, because you are a stakeholder, customer, citizen affected by smart cities and most importantly by the future.

The highest value Smart-City activity is the creative process.

For clarity note the following:

• The creative process is one part of the overall co-design process.
• In Smart Cities we talk about co-design because we need customers, citizens and stakeholders involved. Not to be seen as being nice to everyone, but as a key strategy to minimise the chances of failing. This principle well known from other domains such as startups.
• We never want to design a piece in isolation of the whole — a common problem in Smart Cities. Why? Because such pieces probably won’t fit the final puzzle, in fact they may block better innovations. So we sometimes talk of ‘system design’ — designing the whole system not fragmented pieces.
• We don’t need final system designs but we do need frameworks and high-level system blueprints to guide our thinking about the pieces. These high level frameworks must be compatible with and help drive sustainable futures.
• A proper systems design is not secret code for ‘boring over-designed city landscapes’. A proper creative design process should avoid this outcome.
  A proper design can provide the environment for a city to evolve in creative ways but always toward sustainable, cost-effective outcomes.

About the Author

Neil has spent most of his career firstly creating a developing new technologies and tools as a PhD researcher/engineer and later working to help other researchers bridge the innovation gap. This gap is the chasm between a great prototype tool that works in a laboratory and the actual product that sells successfully in the ‘real world’ due to the customer benefits it brings. That latter challenge is exactly what Smart Cities face; the new tools must be successfully altered and incorporated into reimagined processes that deliver genuine value. This requires taking the focus off the tools.