By IOT Content Manager

Which U.S. cities stand to benefit most from investment in smart city infrastructure? Chordant, a smart city-focused subsidiary of InterDigital partnered with CA Technologies to answer that question. They came up with the recently unveiled CA-Chordant Smart City Benefits Index, which rounds up the top 50 municipalities that they believe have the most smart city potential.

“We created the CA-Chordant Smart City Benefits Index because we think it’s important for public officials to understand the benefit their cities and regions could unlock with the right IoT strategy,” said Jim Nolan, executive vice president at Chordant. While cities in tech hubs like Boston or San Francisco may be most likely to invest in smart city infrastructure, cities that have traditionally lagged in technology implementation have much to gain by embracing the concept of smart cities — most notably in attracting companies and jobs, Nolan said. “We feel it’s imperative that public officials, who hold the responsibility of optimally serving their citizens and community, truly understand the benefit that Smart City technology can deliver.” 

In the research project, Chordant enlisted the help of Compass Intelligence to help come up with the index for the ranking. Compass Intelligence’s CEO, Stephanie Atkinson, explained that “a smart city is open, high-tech, eco-friendly, responsive, and innovative serving citizens and the community with optimized services. Our goal with this research was to gather key defining metrics and statistics of cities and leverage that data to model with a scoring and ranking system into an index.”

[Smart Cities Summit is the go-to event for government and technology executives mapping America’s smart cities. Visit the site to learn more about the agenda, speakers and networking opportunities.]

Most rankings for smart cities look at which cities have already invested in smart city infrastructure and can make a case for how their investment has already improved the quality of life of residents. “[T]his research is unique in identifying who will benefit the most as this is a driver for return on investment and also an opportunity for technology companies to understand the position of given cities today,”

Cities continue to embrace smart city technologies, automation and Internet of Things to provide benefits such as improving public safety, reducing congestion and pollution, enhance traffic management and routing, bettering transit systems, and much more.”

In the following slideshow, we list the 10 cities that scored best in the ranking: