Dentsu Aegis Network and MIT shed light on APAC’s smart city imperative in new report

Dentsu Aegis Network has launched a new white paper examining the progress of Asia Pacific’s smart cities, including local deep-dives into eight key markets in the region. In its third year, this series on Asia Pacific’s digital disruption aims to deliver thought leadership to arm Dentsu Aegis Network and its agency brands’ clients and partners with the insight they need to succeed in the digital economy.

This year, in collaboration with MIT Technology Review, the report argues that increasingly, smart city initiatives in Asia Pacific are being developed and driven to improve quality of life for the region’s citizens and consumers, to manage cities’ growth sustainably, and to maintain their global competitiveness.

The paper – titled “Connectivity and QoL : How digital consumer habits and ubiquitous technology are driving smart city development in Asia Pacific” – consolidates extensive in-market research and nearly two-dozen in-depth interviews with key industry players from India, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, including newly appointed managing director of Isobar Australia, Erik Hallander.

The report found two key factors that distinguish Asia Pacific’s smart city efforts from other regions around the globe. Governments and businesses are more willing to invest in experimental models that exploit new technologies, business models, and urban planning design.

Locally, the report notes that urban sustainability in every sense – economic, environmental and societal – is an increasing priority for the Australian government. With more than three quarters of Australia’s population living in cities which in turn, generate more than 80% of the country’s GDP, a federally-coordinated smart city development effort is essential to maintain our uninterrupted economic growth.

Says Nick Waters, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific: “Asia Pacific has enjoyed robust economic expansion in recent years, with cities at the heart of this growth. With development comes challenges, but cities in the region are transforming these challenges into opportunities with the help of technology and innovation. Smart cities in Asia Pacific are quickly becoming pilot markets for the digital economy.

“The white paper helps us understand what drives the development of smart cities in Asia Pacific, how businesses can leverage them to develop digital economy solutions and how we can contribute to make these cities more viable, livable, and sustainable.”

Says Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, CEO and publisher, MIT Technology Review: “While no two Asia Pacific markets have the exact same mix of smart city strategies or assets, we have found that nearly all such projects attempt to use smart cities to serve two goals simultaneously: address immediate infrastructure or service delivery challenges while ‘future-proofing’ their economies against threats looming on the horizon. The region’s most innovative smart city efforts also open themselves up to collaboration with the private sector to not only address these issues but to create exportable technologies and applications.”

Says Arvind Sethumadhavan, chief innovation officer, Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific: “The big opportunity for businesses is the delivery of new and enhanced services. Smart Cities are empowering Asian consumers to boot as the ‘fabric of the data surrounding them at all times’ makes them aware of the things they need without even searching. New business models can be rapidly developed and tested which sit at the intersection of online and offline worlds. The fabric of available new data will herald the onset of pervasive personalization of marketing messages.”

The paper also outlines six common themess of Asia Pacific’s successful smart city initiatives, including: leveraging cloud technology; creating ‘open’ and accessible ecosystems, and through this harnessing the power of startup ecosystems; consumer- driven application development; mixing ‘greenfield’ and ‘brownfield’ smart city experiments; IoT and sensor-based platforms; and cashless economies.

Click here to access the full white paper.