The original point that differentiates this text from otherwise similar texts is that it looks
at the building of smart cities from the viewpoint of an interchange of knowledge among
companies in different industries or Ba as shared context in motion and emphasizes that the
resulting value becomes a source of new corporate competitive advantage. In recent years
numerous publications have appeared that analyze smart cities from various perspectives
including urban planning and administration network theory and innovation. However few are
academic texts that approach the subject from the viewpoint of corporate competitive advantage
against a theoretical background in management studies as this one does. This book is the
first full-scale academic work to analyze smart cities from the viewpoint of corporate
competitive advantage.Research into corporate competitive advantage includes the positioning
and the resource-based views with the former focusing on companies' external environment and
the latter on their internal resources. Although these theories' foci of attention necessarily
differ they both developed as tools for analyzing companies' relative merits and their chances
of succeeding in the marketplace and they take the common premise that competitive advantage
is built through competition among companies.In contrast this book sees corporate competitive
advantage as arising not through competition but through co-creation among companies. It
differs in its approach from existing theories in thinking that emphasizing co-creation over
competition enables an analysis that better describes actual conditions when considering smart
cities and corporate competitive advantage. Put another way when new values arise from
attempts to exchange and fuse knowledge expertise and other factors at the ba where companies
from different industries collaborate these values are surely brought about through
co-creation among companies.Another point regarding thisbook's original perspective on
competitive advantage is its emphasis on the relationship between the creation of social value
and competitive advantage. The question of the extent to which socially useful values can be
created in the markets of the 21st century is closely linked to corporate competitive
advantage. The issues of building smart cities and corporate competitive advantage are themes
that this perspective can firmly grasp.This book intends to take up three different projects
from among the smart-city building developments taking shape in Japan and undertake case
studies based on the theoretical framework outlined above. The central themes will analyze the
mechanism of co-creation among companies and the relationship of created value to competitive
advantage. This analysis aims to demonstrate one model relating to corporate competitive
advantage in the 21st century.
