Citizen engagement as a business model for smart energy communities

Citizen Engagement for energy efficient cities and communities is a concept that is well researched. Quite often in the context of a smart city and the related technology paradigms and infrastructures that citizens must deal with. However, as the concept of smart cities becomes mainstream, the assumption is that citizens naturally and passively shift with these changes. In any given sector business models are natural benefactors to nascent technologies from which revenues and markets are created. In the smart cities space there is a wide range of innovations over citizen engagement strategies and citizen-centric activities including providing trusted sources for democratic legitimacy and transparency with local governments. The common focus has been on finding the trigger that engages communities in a sustainable way. The novelty in this paper is based on the idea that sustained citizen engagement needs a business model, in the same way that new markets need business models, around which frameworks for stakeholder definition, value added propositions, revenue creation and required outcomes can be developed and shared as a common vision.