by Shane Henson — June 28, 2013—International Data Corporation (IDC) published a new report this month, Business Strategy: Building Synergies in the Smart Ecosystem—How Smart Cities Can Support Smart Building Technology Deployment that offers insight into how stakeholder collaboration can maximize the benefits generated by deploying smart technologies for public and private facilities in urban environments.
According to IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, the discussion will help policy makers, building owners, and technology vendors better understand how working together can grow investment in smart technologies to expand economic development and sustainability. The new report presents the results of interviews with smart technology vendors, city executives, and leverages the market constructs developed by IDC’s Smart Cities and Smart Buildings research services.
Smart building technologies enable the optimization of facilities and generate economic and environmental benefits, key goals in the development of sustainable Smart Cities, IDC explains. However, smart building initiatives in urban areas are often developed and orchestrated independently from the larger city or municipal effort around energy management and sustainability. Smart building initiatives for publicly owned buildings may also be developed without including the larger ecosystem of players because the champions and beneficiaries of the improvements generated by deploying smart building technologies come from different stakeholder groups. Collaboration between stakeholders could maximize the economic and environmental benefits for both public and private building owners and extend value to the larger Smart City ecosystem as well.
Key findings of the report include:
- City and state governments should provide the leadership to engage stakeholders. Cities that conscientiously build an issue-based ecosystem around sustainability in buildings will most effectively promote smart building technology adoption and maximize progress toward Smart City energy, sustainability, and private development goals.
- City governments, private and public building owners, and technology vendors share many goals for operational efficiencies, facility cost reductions, and sustainability improvements. Stakeholder collaboration is the foundation for developing and executing strategic investment plans to develop smart buildings in the urban environment.
- Cities need to develop strategies to promote common sustainability and efficiency goals and help building owners adopt smart building technologies at a faster rate. Strategies to do this include: fostering a smart building innovation ecosystem; developing policies that support smart building as part of larger sustainability initiatives; accelerating investment through focused financing; and using city efforts as proof of concept for private building owners.
The new report highlights the shared goals of stakeholders and puts them in the context of the motivations driving these goals. In addition, the report generalizes how key stakeholders perceive a variety of economic and environmental goals and can be used to identify opportunities for coordination of policy, strategy, and investment, says IDC.
