Ready, set, go. Earlier this week IBM announced their Smart City Challenge – a competition for cities to help investigate and launch smart city initiatives. IBM will award $50 million worth of technology and services to help 100 municipalities across the globe. The city has to articulate a plan with several strategic issues it would like to address and demonstrate a track record of successful problem solving, a commitment to the use of technology and willingness to provide access to city leaders. Hmmm...this sounds exactly like IBM’s existing target market.
The challenge for IBM is to demonstrate that this program is incremental to IBM’s existing activities with cities and local governments. This program really is an opportunity to extend smart city activities – both from a philanthropy perspective and from a business development perspective. (I’m acknowledging that there can be business development in philanthropy.) Will cities that have not yet embarked on a smart city initiative or program now consider applying for funding and assistance in starting down that path?
One way to ensure a broader, and incremental, audience is to get the word out – and, actually evangelize to cities that have not already understood the benefits of technology as a means of addressing their critical pain points. Many of these are perhaps smaller cities, which leads me to another recommendation.
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Forrester’s Smart City Tweet Jam was a great success. On Tuesday morning/afternoon/evening, smart city followers around the globe participated in an hour of intense tweeting on smart cities. We touched on a range of issues from the definitions of a “city” and a “smart city” and the evolution toward the goal of becoming smart to the challenges city leaders face and the business models that enable adoption of technology-based solutions. We ended with a contrarian view that “smart cities” might just be a fade. But that was quickly refuted with reminders of the growing challenges faced by cities and the imperative of facing these challenges in a sustainable manner. 
One hour, 62 Twitterers, and 389 tweets later we were exhausted – at least I was. But we were pleased to have aired and shared our opinions about the challenges, the potential solutions to those challenges, and the paths and business models that will make those solutions possible in the short-run, and hopefully sustainable in the longer term. Below are some excerpts from the conversation. But there were many interesting points of view and contributions to the discussion. I've included here a visual representation of the key words and topics discussed during the Tweet Jam, created using