Supporting Small and Medium-sized Enterprises with Smart City Data for Circular Innovations

The exponential growth of data and the rapid advancement of technology are driving transformative changes globally. Simultaneously, urbanization is speeding up, positioning cities as the primary environments in which vast amounts of data are generated and used. This trend presents both opportunities and challenges, particularly in the context of sustainable urban development and carbon neutrality goals. Many services in urban areas are provided by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), making their development critical to achieving these goals. Cities have a strong interest in supporting the growth of companies that provide urban services and operate within city infrastructures. This work-in-progress paper presents the preliminary findings from an exploratory case study. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of cities in enabling circular innovations among service providers, with a specific focus on how city-generated data can support SMEs in adopting circular practices. The findings highlight the crucial role cities play in helping service providers develop circular innovations by offering digital platforms, ensuring open data access, fostering public–private partnerships (PPPs), implementing supportive policies, and providing financial incentives. Together, these efforts create an environment where service providers can adopt circular business models (CBMs) and integrate resource-efficient, waste-reducing practices into their operations. The findings also suggest that SMEs can drive circular innovations by integrating open city data with their proprietary "my data" and by leveraging smart city data to optimize resource use. They can further strengthen their efforts by adopting advanced AI and analytics tools for predictive insights and by following a structured CBM development cycle.