What is the Source of Smart City Value?: A Business Model Analysis

Smart cities have attracted an increasing international scientific and business attention and an enormous niche market is being evolved, which engages almost all the business sectors. Being engaged in the smart city market is not free-of-charge and corresponding investments are extensive, while they usually concern innovation development and always demand careful planning. However, until today it is not clear how the smart city creates value to its stakeholders or simply how profit is being created. To this end, this paper performs an investigation on the smart city business models and utilizes decision making process with the contribution of smart city experts in order to conclude on the most appropriate one. This paper's findings demonstrate that business models that are followed in practice by smart cities are different to the ones suggested in literature. Moreover, the decision making processes that were followed showed that the optimal choice is the ownership business model group and from its contents preferred the Open Business Model (OBM), with the Municipal-Owned-Development (MOD) as an alternative option.