What are the key strategic success factors that enable smart cities to accelerate and ensure effective implementation?

Societies and cities are facing more and more challenges. At the societal level, many major global challenges have emerged such as climate change, rising water levels, population growth, poverty, etc... These global challenges affect cities and push them to move towards a more sustainable way of life by tackling issues such as mobility, energy, environment, education and health. To counteract these challenges and to adapt to the changing times, cities have had to develop techniques. A commonly used technique is to transform a city into a “smart city”. But then, what's a smart city? To answer this question, we decided to use the definition established by HEC Liège, defining it as : « A smart city is an ecosystem of stakeholders engaged in a process of sustainable transition in a given territory using new technologies as a facilitator to achieve these sustainable objectives (Smart City Institute, 2017) ». To learn more about these smart cities and mainly about what the transition from city to smart city involves, we decided to study the strategic aspect and learn more about these key success factors. To do so, we will answer the following research question: « What are the strategic success factors that enable smart cities to accelerate and ensure effective implementation? ». The current research started with an overview of secondary research conducted by academics and industry experts on the topic of strategic implementation of smart cities, in order to gain more insight and as a preparatory step for the case studies based on Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) and Brussels Smart City (BSC). These case studies were selected to discuss the framework of smart cities in Europe, but also because of their different approaches, which led them to different results. In order to compare them as accurately as possible, we assessed most of the strategic frameworks from the scientific literature and selected two of them: the SMART framework (Letaifa, 2015) and the Smart City Reference Model (Zygiaris, 2012). Indeed, we found them to be the most comprehensive, cross-sectoral and addressing transition as a process and not as an exhaustive list of themes to be addressed. Research results showed that Amsterdam was ahead of Brussels in all action fields as a result of its strategy, vision and leadership. In addition, through this research, we were able to extract an exhaustive list of 17 key success factors, which we have categorized into 3 scales corresponding to the SMART model (Letaifa, 2015), because each strategic success factor has a specific importance over time. The limitations of the research are the use of qualitative data and reliance on secondary research only. Moreover, we have only used case studies of two European cities characterised by a strong proximity and some similar characteristics, thus, our assessment on the strategic implications cannot be extend beyond these cities. For future research, we will recommend the use of mixed research methods and the use of more case studies in order to reach a consensus on the strategic success factors when implementing a smart city strategy. However, we advise to always keep a geographical focus on a particular region when selecting cities.