The Smart City and the Co-creation of Value

The original point that differentiates this text from otherwise similar texts is that it looks at the building of smart cities from the viewpoint of an interchange of knowledge among companies in different industries, or "Ba" as shared context in motion, and emphasizes that the resulting value becomes a source of new corporate competitive advantage. In recent years numerous publications have appeared that analyze smart cities from various perspectives including urban planning and administration, network theory, and innovation. However, few are academic texts that approach the subject from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage against a theoretical background in management studies, as this one does. This book is the first full-scale academic work to analyze smart cities from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage.Research into corporate competitive advantage includes the positioning and the resource-based views, with the former focusing on companies' external environment and the latter on their internal resources. Although these theories' foci of attention necessarily differ, they both developed as tools for analyzing companies' relative merits and their chances of succeeding in the marketplace, and they take the common premise that competitive advantage is built through competition among companies.In contrast, this book sees corporate competitive advantage as arising not through competition but through "co-creation" among companies. It differs in its approach from existing theories in thinking that emphasizing co-creation over competition enables an analysis that better describes actual conditions when considering smart cities and corporate competitive advantage. Put another way, when new values arise from attempts to exchange and fuse knowledge, expertise, and other factors at the "ba" where companies from different industries collaborate, these values are surely brought about through co-creation among companies.Another point regarding