Smart cities offer a wide range of benefits, from cost savings to livability, safety and security, resilience, and sustainability. However, the positive impact on economic development is another critical benefit. On one hand, economic development should be seen as sitting at the top of a hierarchy of benefits. On the other hand, economic criteria only represent hard benefits, not taking into account the many soft benefits related to citizen involvement, convenience, and overall satisfaction.

How to implement soft benefits ? Industrial Internet of Things and Blockchain will help.

Apart from the fact that an increasingly larger part of the global population will live in cities — from around 50% today to around 70% in 2050 — the very role and importance of cities is also evolving fast:

Centers of Next-Generation Technology Deployments: Deployments of almost all next-generation technologies are often exclusively targeted at urban environments, driven by economic and return on investment (ROI) imperatives. Examples include 5G and low-power, wide-area (LPWA), roadside sensors, Internet of Things (IoT), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), cryptocurrency payments and Blockchain.

Growth Engines for the Economy of the Future: Cities are increasingly responsible for an ever-growing part of the economic output, but at the same time they are also becoming the growth engines of the new smart economy of the future, closely linked to new technology-driven paradigms like distributed resources, Blockchain-enabled smart contracts and Crypto Economy.

The traditional economy, centered on employment in manufacturing, is starting to give way to new models, aimed at increasing efficiencies, increasing utilization rates of assets, and creating more scalable approaches, which are heavily linked to as a service shared, crowdsourced, and distributed models supporting new forms of (self-)employment and microbusinesses. This new smart economy is made possible by a range of technologies including IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation, e-commerce, and blockchain for micropayments and eGovernment. These technologies are not just reorganizing and restructuring the economy, but actually transforming, redefining, and reinventing it. This is where the largest opportunity for smart cities resides in terms of stimulating technologies and sector innovation that will drive the creation of employment in the future.

The level of economic development and availability of employment in smart cities is directly related to the overall quality of life and citizen satisfaction. Hence, economic health is a key dimension of smart city policies, though often without being explicitly mentioned. It relates, directly or indirectly, to smart infrastructure for energy, office buildings and transportation (road, railway, and air), but also to soft capabilities like smart health and smart funding. In the end, it comes down to companies being able to operate at the lowest cost level, having access to reliable services and utilities, being able to conduct business efficiently (minimizing time lost in traffic congestions or in bureaucratic processes) and having access to skilled workers and flexible financing. Ultimately, smart city technology will be a main contributing factor to the overall economic competitiveness of cities.

What are the technological drivers for economic growth ?

Connectivity Platforms and Technologies: A range of connectivity technologies including decentralized platforms on Blockchain and LPWA technology allow important cost savings through smart grids, smart street lights, and smart trash cans, as well as enable safer transportation and improved health;

Sensors: Both embedded and mobile sensors, in combination with connectivity, allow for the optimized use of assets through better access to real-time information, in addition to monitoring environmental metrics to control air and water quality;

Analytics: Advanced analytics allow extracting actionable intelligence, from condition-based monitoring to advanced preventive and predictive maintenance, resulting in significant additional cost savings as well as the provision of reliable, uninterrupted services.

Cryptocurrency payments: Each citizen should be able to buy smart services with special cryptocurrency. It must be very simple, fast and safe. And automatic.

Many European countries think about giving people money just because they are citizens of these countries. But CryptoPayments and Industrial IoT open another possibility. Using IoT Services, any citizen will be able to receive a compensation in CryptoCoins. For example, using the SmartParking service, the driver will receive some CryptoCoins just by booking a parking. These CryptoCoins can be spent on anything. Cities benefit — less congestion on the road, and so does the citizen.

New financial instruments like distributed ledgers will be critical for organizing trusted interactions between an increasing number of actors in the new economies, especially when it relates to decentralized, disintermediated peer-to-peer transactions, meshed environments, and frictionless cross-vertical collaboration and commerce, which will require massive amounts of automated micropayments that are subject to dynamic pricing, often between physical systems to which identities will be assigned.

Examples including wireless EV charging and driverless vehicle sharing. Blockchain will enable seamless participation of all citizens in a networked, all-in economy, driving innovation, unseen levels of activity, wealth, and growth. Blockchain will change the very nature of enterprises, ecosystems, trade, money and financial services, and the economy as a whole, with real-time and reliable information exchange, driving global market transparency.

Industrial Internet of Things Telecom (IIoT Telecom) is one of the first companies, developing decentralized IIoT Platform and LoRaWAN network in complex. In its decisions, it tries to develop all soft benefits for Smart Cities.

P.S. Pre-ICO starts Febrary 19, 2018. Join!

You can read more: https://iiot.tel/files/shares/IIoT-Services-for-Cities2.pdf

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