Cisco calculates the $10b benefits as a combination of the following public and private sector benefits it identifes as deriving from the creation of a smart SEQ region.

Public Sector

– Benefits for agencies, employees, and citizens

– Quantified citizen outcomes (such as reduced traffic congestion, crime, etc.)

– Hard cost savings, increased revenues, and productivity gains

– Allowances for implementation and operational costs

Private Sector

– Shifts of benefits among competing firms in an industry

– Shifts of benefits among different industries

– New-to-the-world revenue growth from innovation

– Cost savings from more efficient processes

– Allowances for implementation costs

To derive the value, a team of economists from Cisco and Cicero Group looked at a portfolio of more than 60 use cases and completed a bottom-up economic model of the value created by deploying a service such as Smart Lighting (ie LED-based lights, monitored by sensors and connected to an intelligent control system). The figure they derived was then scaled for Southeast Queensland by looking at the region’s GDP, industry and population size and growth rate to give the $10b estimate.

30,000 Jobs

The 30,00 jobs figure was derived from the experience of Barcelona, where, according to Cisco, there are 22 major programs and 83 separate projects underway including smart lighting, smart parking, smart water management and smart waste management.

These, it says, have produced some impressive results: $58m annual savings using smart water technology; $50m annual increase in parking- fee revenues due to use of smart parking technology and 47,000 new jobs.  “We’ve scaled the results of Barcelona and other leading cities where we have worked and applied them to the portfolio of services that are likely to resonate in Queensland — the kinds of things mentioned in our recent report, South East Queensland: A Smart Region.”