Welcome to our Smart Cities & Smart Citizens Exploring 5G, IoT and the Connected World

Do we need a new vision for Smart Cities?

Whether people are ready or not, Smart Cities are here. The demand for the technology behind their development is already huge and will only keep growing. A report from PwC predicts that the global Smart City market will hit an annual growth rate of 23% by 2024, reaching a value in excess of $2tn (PwC, 2019). But what does it mean for the people living in these urban areas? Our whole notion of what Smart Cities represent is being challenged. We thought it would revolve around the ideas of connectivity, convenience, and access. Co-working spaces, better transport, and linked services are all hallmarks of what our IoT-connected cities can deliver. For the people we share our cities with – as well as the infrastructure required to deliver everything we may once have taken for granted. This is making us re-examine the relationship we have as citizens with every organisation we interact with – especially the firms and businesses we work with. So, what does this mean for Smart Cities – a concept that will touch on every area of our lives?

Building Smart Cities Around the People

Ultimately, the aim of any Smart City is to enrich the lives of its citizens – whether through better services or the creation of inclusive, healthy environments. That’s why any organisation involved in creating Smart Cities must look beyond siloed solutions for bikes, bins, and benches to develop systems that make a real difference to Smart Citizens.

After all, if the essence of urban development is individual action, a city can only be as smart as its citizens (Forbes, 2019). In this way, outcomes will be hugely important in Smart Cities – including the ability to measure how our cities empower the new Smart Citizens to improve their rights, wellbeing, health, security, and prosperity. Demonstrating the power citizens will have to shape new ways of life will be vital.

Find out more on our panel insights and discussions

Blockchain FAQs

What is the technology and why is it valuable?

Blockchain technology offers transformative improvements for identity management. A central characteristic of Blockchain technology is its distributed, decentralised structure – obviating the need for third-party management. Blockchain is powering a personal data revolution. Relying on physical identity documents in an ever-growing digital age is outdated, cumbersome and expensive, but also increases the risk of fraud, hacking and spoofing. Events relating to the use of customer data for identification purposes can be stored on the Blockchain.

What does it mean for the user?

With so much of our life and commerce on-line the current methods of handling identity, usernames, passwords, authentication and user verification is error prone. Blockchain technology has established a new paradigm for handling digital identities – self-managed identity. Self-managed identity allows customers to create and manage their own identity, removing the need for a central repository. This new, digital concept using decentralisation and public key cryptography to give individuals control over their data. When implemented correctly, it can provide flexibility, scalability, security and consensual interactions. For the customer, this means they can transact in a frictionless, trusted, yet private manner. Identity management can also offer increased data privacy, identity is held on the user’s devices and is shared directly with products and services when required.

Our “Discover the Possible” series explores the challenges and opportunities of across the emerging technology landscape. “Discover the Possible” separates the fact from the fiction, translating the buzz words and jargon into simple plain language, and analysing real business use cases. The Invenica team collaborate with clients, partners and subject matter experts to produce White Papers, Webinars and Industry Articles to spark discussion and debate across the markets.