Living Labs, Innovation Districts and Information Marketplaces: A Systems Approach for Smart Cities

In the past few years many groundbreaking promises have been made about the potential of the Smart City. The future of cities relies perceivably on ubiquitous sensing, and anytime-anywhere information access and control. However, city leaders are still struggling to identify the quantifiable sources of value that novel ICT can generate. Current Smart City investment is characterized by relatively small demonstrators that often lack the scalability to have real and long lasting impacts on the economy. In this paper we adopt the view of a Smart City as an information marketplace and look at how we might use existing and tested concepts of fostering technology innovation to support city leaders in navigating this unknown territory. In particular we use systems thinking to scope how the concepts of the ‘Living Lab’ and the ‘Innovation District’ can work together in a complementary fashion to create a candidate model for the implementation of the Smart City.