(Above image by Serena Wong/Pixabay)

IDC Asia/Pacific named recently the 19 out of 148 most outstanding smart city projects in the Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) for the 2018 IDC Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (Scapa).

The winning entries were selected across 12 functional categories with China, Taiwan, and Singapore as the biggest winners claiming five, four, and three awards, respectively. Other winning countries include Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

“Rapid urbanization and the exponential population growth of APEJ cities are severely constraining urban ecosystems,” says Gerald Wang, head, Public Sector, IDC Government Insights and IDC Health Insights, Asia Pacific. “Coupled with increased socioeconomic pressures — aging populations, inadequate housing options — and aging infrastructures, many APEJ city governments, and city administrators are driven to seek investments in Smart City solutions to guarantee their city’s future survivability. Such city management solutions are expected to deliver better urban planning and operational efficiencies, enable higher-quality stakeholder engagements and closer collaborations, as well as influence widespread knowledge capital transformation with government employees, local businesses, and residents so cities can develop more sustainably.”

“Even as municipalities globally are not the flattest, most agile organizations, city leaders should take the lead in rolling out viable and sustainable initiatives to transform traditional bureaucracies. They should not fall into the trap of waiting to be the last mile beneficiary of industrywide innovations. Inevitably, strategic and operational silos will not bring about an enviable future ecology of ‘live, learn, work, and play’. IDC believes that cities with agile operations, constant capability building, long-term investments in innovation for relevance and competitive advantage, as well as an open and collaborative ecosystem will pave the way forward in socioeconomic growth and excellence,” says Wang.

IDC Government Insights went through a rigorous six-phased benchmarking exercise to determine the Top Smart City projects for 2017-2018. These included identifying and cataloging the key Smart City projects in Asia/Pacific by IDC Analysts across APeJ (50 percent), online voting to determine public opinion (25 percent), and the assessment of an International Advisory Council (25 percent).