commitments in the EIP-SCC Action Cluster IPPR and other public authorities, businesses, and research institutes, for the initiative “From Planning to Implementation and Upscaling of Smart City projects”, led by Judith Borsboom and Margit Noll. Among these meetings were most relevant:
- EIP General Assembly, May 2016 in Eindhoven
- Nordic Edge in Stavanger and EIP-SCC Action Cluster meeting, both September 2016
- Smart City Expo Barcelona, November 2016 in Barcelona
- Nottingham Study Tour, March 2017 in Nottingham
- EIP-SCC General Assembly, June 2017 in Brussels
- Nordic Edge conference in Stavanger, September 2017
- Review Meeting at DG-Energy, October 2017 in Brussels
- EIP-SCC General Assembly, June 2018 in Sofia
- Action Cluster IPPR meeting October 2018, in Brussels
Topics explored during these workshops were phases of implementation, key stakeholders and their roles, common pitfalls and barriers during planning and implementation, innovative solutions and best practices, the role of standards, and how to ensure replication and upscaling. Based on the outcomes of these workshops, a preliminary outline for the SCGP was developed. This outline was subsequently filled in with a desk and literature research on phases of implementation and obstacles for implementation and replication, solutions, actors and their roles. Nearly 50,000 FP7 & H2020 projects were scanned in order to find the relevant ones to connect and delve deeper and the SCIS proved to be an excellent source of information (SCIS, 2019
Projects face many issues in different stages of their development. Initially, the focus was on these issues. Specific challenges, obstacles, and barriers were excluded from the analysis if they were relevant only to a particular technology. Projects were excluded from the research sources if they involved only:
- design, conceptualization, scenarios, methodologies, or other theoretical strategies;
- metrics, indicators, or standards design, development, or definition;
- cloud-based solutions;
- optimization, modelling, or management approaches;
- framework, platform, software, or app development;
- development, refinement, or marketing of private products.
Remaining projects that may have been relevant but that provided no website, deliverables, or project material access were also excluded. Categories of issues from planning to implementation were originally adapted from content in (Di Nucci et al., 2010) and (Wnuk et al., 2010) with inputs from (CoM, 2016; SCSP, 2013a, 2013b), interviews, and workshops.
However, to get more in-depth information on the implementation of smart city projects and the needs of fellow or follower cities for further development of content for the SCGP, a more detailed understanding was needed. Therefore, city representatives, projects managers and researchers, in particular of SCC-01 lighthouse projects, were contacted and about 25 were interviewed, many of them implementing lighthouse projects or participating as follower or fellow city. These key players were asked to define and illustrate phases of implementation, and to map relevant actors and their specific roles. In addition, they were requested to provide details on obstacles and on solutions that had helped to overcome them. Finally, their experiences with replication and scaling up were discussed. Confidentiality of interview outcomes needs to be guaranteed to get usable outcomes. Privacy issues were protected by rules of the NSD – Norwegian Centre for Research Data.
Besides, through ERANET and JPI Urban Europe research and innovation funding calls, 17 additional smart city projects are involved, mostly in medium-sized cities, and have substantial findings on replication and scaling up. The Action Cluster IPPR initiative “KPIs and tools for decision making and benchmarking”, led by Bernard Gindroz (European Energy Award-eea-, CEN/CENELEC, ETSI), has bundled experiences and best practices in the field of roadmap development, monitoring and standardisation, in particular on the methods used by eea.
The findings were discussed with lighthouse and fellow cities, ICLEI and Eurocities city networks, and SCC-01 project managers, and enriched with their feedback. This resulted in the first version of this SCGP (Borsboom-van Beurden et al., 2017).
Based on conclusive arguments brought forward by the participants of the DG-Energy hosted workshop October 2017 in Brussels, it was decided to add more information about the steps in developing smart city plans and their subsequent trajectory, not only towards implementation, but also towards monitoring, replication and scaling up. Main content of the SCGP was reorganised, additional interviews were conducted, and more material collected on examples. Besides, a more in-depth study of the eea method took place. Eventually, all these inputs were combined in this novel methodology for developing a coherent roadmap for integrated planning and implementation of smart city projects that is at the heart of this guidebook, and a pre-test version was finalised in November 2018.
Following, between November 2018 and February 2019, five testbed workshops were organised in fellow cities from SCC-01 projects IRIS, Smarter Together, and Ruggedised: Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Sofia, Vaasa Brno and Parma. During these workshops, participants were invited to propose actions the city and its local ecosystem could take during each particular stage of the roadmap. Evaluation rounds at the end of each testbed session provided invaluable material for improving the SCGP in terms of language and terminology, order of topics, density and comprehensibility of information, and so forth. Early 2019, these comments and advices have been used to update the content and style with the present result. Crucially, without these five fellow cities and their stakeholders willing to spend time, and share their needs and ideas, it would have been impossible to increase the quality of the document, and the authors are immensely grateful for these opportunities. Main changes since then have been the combination of all introductory texts in one big pre-chapter, an improved lay-out of steps per stage in form of checklist with to do’s, a reversed order for all barriers and solutions, more examples added, and a heavy redaction.
