Upscaling Smart City Projects
A successful smart city project might inspire city stakeholders to expand the project or upscale the project into a wider area of application. Van Winden et al. (2016) distinguished three types of smart city project upscaling that can be useful to understand how the project can be applied in another context based on their type and goals of the project.
- Roll-out
When a new technology or solution was a success in the testing or pilot, this smart city project then can be rolled out or commercialised in the wider market. In this kind of upscaling, the technology or solution can be used without additional partnership or much modification on the product.
- Expansion
A successful pilot can also be expanded by adding partners, adding functions, or scaling up the geographical cover. This kind of upscaling usually applies to platform projects where the value can expand by growing the number of participating organisations to provide benefits for more people.
- Replication
A successful smart city project can also be upscaled by adopting the solution to other area or cities. This is the most complicated type of upscaling as it may face challenges due to the differing context. A typical barrier to the replication of smart city projects in other cities (especially
data-based solutions) is the lack of standards, open data formats and protocols. Poor transfer of knowledge also hindered the process of replication in the new context and caused the solution to be unsuccessful.
Van Winden et al. (2016) suggested that city stakeholders should considered how a project might be upscaled since the beginning of the planning, to prepare on engaging potential partners and prepare the knowledge sharing of the lesseon learned. Furthermore, most importantly other area/cities can learn not only how the technology works but also how the partnership was built, how the project was organised, and business models were created that will increase the success rate of smart city initiatives.
Reference:
van Winden, W., Oskam, I., van den Buuse, D., Schrama, W., & van Dijck, E-J. (2016). Organising smart city projects: lessons from Amsterdam. Hogeschool van Amsterdam
