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Dentsu Aegis Network and MIT share on Smart City
27 Oct
From left: Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau (CEO and Publisher, MIT Technology Review); Arvind Sethumadhavan(Chief Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific); Vivek Puthucode (General Manager, Public Sector, Microsoft Asia Pacific) and Uptin Saiidi (Multimedia Correspondent, CNBC Asia).
Dentsu Aegis Network has launched a 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” – outlines six common themess: 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.
Nick Waters, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific, said, “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.”
Asia Pacific also has an unique approach in its efforts to engage private sector players in developing smart cities. More collaborations have emerged between the government and the region’s leading technology firms – China’s Alibaba, India’s Reliance Communications, Japan’s Panasonic, and others – to deliver smart city projects.
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau, CEO and Publisher, MIT Technology Review, explained, “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.”
Arvind Sethumadhavan, Chief Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific, added, “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. The fabric of available new data will herald the onset of pervasive personalization of marketing messages.”
