Dimitar Hristov, Cluster Sofia Knowledge City

This is the second article from the total of four consecutive articles I started at the beginning of November on the topic of professional roles (professions) the smart cities need. 

In the project Skills4Cities, we have identified as most important for transforming the cities into smart cities the following three key professions.

• Smart city project developer
• Smart city project manager and
• Smart city project management consultant (advisor)

Dimitar Hristov - KISMC

This publication is inspired by my personal participation in a project (i2Sustain) of Knowledge, Innovation, and Strategies Management Club (KISMC), an active member of the Cluster Sofia Knowledge City. The short article is extracted from the Design Thinking for Impact Incubation Toolkit that was developed by me and my colleagues from KISMC and the other European partners in this project.

I hope that our findings in this Toolkit may be useful also for the mentors who are members of the network established at the CSKC Innovation Hub and accelerator.

Author:

Dimitar Hristov, Cluster Sofia Knowledge City

I think that attracting talents will be one of the most important success factors for cities' management. I do expect to begin a "war" in the frontline of HR (or it has already started) next decade between cities at the global as well as at a regional level. In this war, the role of project managers, advisers, and business developers specialized in the smart city context will become a powerful and long-range gun.

This was the reason to run the project Skills4Cities, which already passed halfway through its implementation.

Dimitar Hristov

This short article is motivated by the upcoming webinar “Mapping technologies and design thinking for smart cities”, in which the cluster is co-organizer and a value-chain support organization. After an in-depth study under the Skills4Cities project, of recent reports on the problems, constraints, and challenges which the smart city projects face the cluster team identified the main challenges related to the development, management, and implementation of Smart City projects.