Profit and Profitability and a Look Through the Lens of Smart Cities

1. Introduction

Profit and profitability in Smart Cities (SC) business models is a new perspective that adopts a lens that seeks to look at the field of social and organizational relationships. Understand how constellations are represented in the social site, which is here circumscribed in the complexity of cities and by the technological insertion that simultaneously changes the way of life and covers the citizens, private organizations, institutions of government, and users of urban services.

In addition, it is examined how the practices of profit generation and profitability occur in this context. Because citizens' psychographic data have become a product, the collective artifacts of cities, funded by the taxes payers, can become income generating assets. This causes new networked centers to emerge on the social site. The focus is on the activities of the entities and how they support the narrative of income generation, profit making and profitability and the evidences sustain to be the view of SC. If may so, must be consider that there is no objective and real representation of a SC so far, there are constructions of visions of how these cities should be organized. These visions will influence how citizens and society will benefit as well as users of SC, organizations and government institutions. The way in which entities will relate and seek a sharing of the benefits of a new arrangement of coexistence styles causes the causal relations of coexistence to be altered. The relations between individual and collective; private organizations and institutions of government may come to govern new rules of coexistence in the spaces where they occur, and the construction of these new contexts that alter the conception of natural conformity of the individuals’ lives and the manner with which the individual assigns meaning to the context.

The methodological framework applied in this article takes as method an exploratory qualitative approach. Once its purpose are inquire phenomenologically the links about smart city’s business model components and effectuations interacting among social relations translating a meaning for profit and profitability. The research unit was oriented towards the practice of managers. Seeking to understand how their knowledge are employed to achieve profit and profitability in a new fashion way of living and significant effects on the exploitation of resources, in a more rational approach in the society as a whole. The development of this study to the best of my knowledge is unheard of in the perspective of overlapping topics related to profit, profitability, innovation and urbanization. The methodological structure adopted is aimed at seeking evidence through manager narratives and the processing between the contextual structure exhibited by them. The objective was to analyze the contextual conception of profit and profitability in the constellation of the SC models.

The findings bring evidence that there is a transformation in the way in which profit and profitability are seen and above all the vision of how they can be shared among the entities of society. Thus the research question (RQ).

• RQ-01: How entities and features emerge in smart cities from the lens of profit and profitability? RQ-02: how does the practice of the executives who act with solutions to SC reaches the profit and profitability in the smart cities context?

The paper is structured as follows. The next section outlines the study’s theoretical background and prior literature. Section 3 details the research design. Section 4 presents the findings. Section 5 discusses the findings and concludes the paper.