Beyond smart cities: Exploring the city role in enabling Society 5.0

Our research aims to find ways for cities to foster data ecosystems and accelerate progress towards more citizen-centric Society 5.0. To analyse the different value creation dimensions in a smart city data ecosystem, we turn to business model literature. The utilization of business model literature and smart cities has been addressed in extant literature (Kummitha, 2019; Schiavone et al., 2019; Walravens, 2012) and business model research has been done in an ecosystem context (Iivari et al., 2022). Business models are critical components in the development of smart cities, as new opportunities are provided by smart cities’ capabilities to produce added value from a city’s real-time data (Belissent, 2010; Zygiaris, 2013). Existing studies call for smart cities to explore new business models to utilize these new opportunities (Feltes, 2021). Specific business model frameworks for smart cities have been established (Walravens, 2012), but more studies on the new, innovative smart city solutions that create, and capture value have been called for (Perätalo et al., 2022).