City Readiness Accelerator Program
Smart Cities Council Cities Readiness Accelerator is a program tailored to your city needs to guide you through the steps to become a resilient and efficient city through the use of technology and innovation. The program ensures cities don’t navigate resilience and readiness alone, but gain the methods, models and partnerships to succeed faster, with lower risk and higher confidence.
Cities today face intensifying pressures:
Solutions exist, but they are complex. They require:
Cities frequently encounter significant barriers, including data silos, a lack of interoperability, gaps in citizen awareness, limited capability or capacity, and difficulty securing funding.
The Smart Cities Council City Readiness Accelerator Program exists to help break through these barriers.
Gain curated support to accelerate your pathway to resilience and technology adoption.
Participating cities are invited to share their priority focus areas such as data governance, AI readiness, digital services, interoperable mobility, energy transition, resilience planning, and more.
The program provides:
Cities enrolled in the program progress through:
These outcomes accelerate real-world implementation, helping cities move more quickly from ambition to action – reducing risk, accelerating adoption and building confidence.
In 2015, Smart Cities Council launched an enhanced version of the landmark Readiness Guide during Smart Cities Week – North America’s first major smart cities conference and expo.
The Guide offered a world-leading framework for government leaders to enhance the livability, workability and sustainability of their cities. At the date of launching the 2.0 version, the Guide had been downloaded by thousands of city leaders and other stakeholders from around the world.
Designed with input from leading smart city and urban planning experts as well as top global technology companies, the vendor-neutral guide enabled city leaders to assess their current state of technology and readiness to become a smart city. Originally launched in 2013, it included a collection of guidelines, best practices and more than 100 case studies to help cities make faster and better decisions for constructing a smart city roadmap and selecting the necessary technologies to get the most from their investments. The new version tripled the number of case studies and includes a new chapter on waste management, sections on the new ISO 37120 Smart City standard, more emphasis on the important role that citizens play, and other additions and improvements.
Sabina Sitaru, then CIO for the City of Hartford, CT, said at the time, “Utilizing the Readiness Guide allowed our city to benchmark our progress and break down the barriers for Hartford to become a smart city. Through the guidance and vendor partnerships of the Smart Cities Council, we were able to construct a roadmap, launch an open data initiative and work on several major projects for public safety, traffic and bringing fiber to every home and business.”
