Measuring Business Benefits and Performance in Smart Cities

Smart City is an urban strategy aiming at improving the quality of life in urban space. It is a comprehensive strategy, addressing all the aspects of wellbeing, that is, economic, social and environmental aspects. The distinctive component of smart city is the large use of technology: indeed, a smart city strategy is largely based on innovative technological solutions to improve the quality of life and to solve the more frequent urban problems. The smart city implementation requires a joint effort from several different actors: local governments, businesses, universities and research centres, citizens by themselves or by not-for-profit organizations. Companies have a pivotal role in the smart city implementation. This paper aims to verify if company members of a smart city body can really realize value from this business; it suggests a comprehensive framework to individuate and measure direct and indirect benefits for companies deriving from the smart city implementation. To empirically observe these benefits and performance, the Genova Smart City Association (GSCA) has been studied.