Transformational Changes in Economy and Society - part 2

We started to talk about what changes we might see taking place on our everyday life when regular cities transform into smart cities on our last post, so now we are going to continue this discussion with the second part of major changes that will be perceived as a city becomes smart.

Smart Education

Smart cities require smart people. Education is critical for development of talent that is motivated and enabled to drive innovation, and new technologies will disrupt the education market. Digitization of education is changing the way it is provided to students. The availability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), combined with the augmented supply due to unbundling of education services, allows a further personalization of education (adaptive learning and adaptive counseling). Students might combine education services from different education providers to form a learning path tailored to their personal preferences, interests and talents. To develop talents, companies can also offer in house education, known as corporate universities.

Smart Finance

Financial service providers are highly dependent on their ability to estimate risks. The increasing data volume combined with new technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence creates opportunities for better risk assessment, allowing peer-to-peer lending supported by data-dased risk assessment. Internet of Things can also be used to create valuable data about insured objects, like cars, if clients allow companies to access their data to prove they have low risk and to participate in gamification to encourage changes in behavior with a more efficient use of the insured product.

Innovation in sensor technology and payments systems makes it possible to generate real-time data about the use of infrastructure, that allows real dynamic pricing. This is essential in smart cities, as they often have vital structure and services with limited capacity. Mobile payments via smartphones combined with biometric authentication are expected to result in complete elimination of cash money in the end.

All new disrupting technologies are connecting directly demand and supply in a way that they eliminates the need of intermediates. In financial sector, blockchain and crowdfunding are good examples of disrupting technologies that allow this kind of interaction.

Smart Tourism & Leisure

Every large event or large public place will have solutions to make it easy to people to know how to get there or how to pass by it. Crowd management by counting individual connected devices through WiFi or cameras that can count each individual through face recognition, indoor navigation and guides for public places like airports or museums, the use of iBeacons and autonomous robotic guides are some examples of disrupting technologies tht smart cities can use to raise the level of comfort of tourists and events' partakers.

Our next post will close this subject with some other very interesting disrupting technologies.