State’s role in shaping the smart city industry development

Abstract

When studies on smart city policies discuss governments’ efforts to facilitate smart city development, they primarily emphasize the local government’s role, as they are stakeholders in those policies. However, these studies often undervalue the significance of state industrial policies in facilitating technological innovation for smart city development. Accordingly, this research aims to answer the question of how state-driven industrial policy enables smart city development by fostering technological innovation within industries. The case study for this research is Taiwan because its state implements the ‘Smart City Taiwan’ policy to involve industries in smart city development actively. I examine this case from a developmental state perspective and reveal that its central government follows the mindset of a developmental state to couple the smart city vision with the national industry goal. The Taiwanese central government assigned local governments of every city to be the initial clients of firms developing smart city technologies. Meanwhile, its central government incentivised firms’ engagements in smart city projects with public resources, such as funding, state-business networks, a cross-agency negotiation platform, etc. This research shows that under the developmental legacy, the smart city policy led by the state can effectively facilitate collaboration between local governments and industries, enabling the widespread use of smart city technologies and benefiting industries.