Developing smart commercial real estate: Technology-based self-service (TBSS) in commercial real estate facilities

Real estate companies are central actors in the development of a smart city. However, most industry participants are conservative and prefer to utilize established, often un-integrated, technologies rather than deploy newer technologies that would help achieve the goals of the smart city. To evaluate the potential of smart commercial real-estate (CRE) we studied a Swedish commercial real estate firm that has developed and deployed a technology-based self-service (TBSS) to help tenants reduce energy consumption. The study was grounded in the theoretical service-dominant (S-D) logic lexicon and our results suggest that for commercial real estate firms to successfully implement TBSS they need to enhance their competence in three areas: management of information technology, within-organization and business-to-business networking skills. Further, these areas are inter-related and successful deployment of TBSS requires improvement in all three areas.