Warsaw’s Smart City Mirage: Unmasking Ranking Variations and Methodological Mysteries of IMD Smart City Index Report

Although the smart city concept is widely adopted globally, there is a growing need to assess the advancement of spatial entities. International Institute for Management Development (IMD) Smart City Index has been providing an annual rating of the smartest cities worldwide since 2019. However, because of the changed methodology for 2023, the comparison is not as straightforward as one would expect. The purpose is to illustrate how ranking position comparison can’t be the unique method as a suitable way for judging a city’s downgrade or promotion, giving a more friendly form of study for decision makers’ assessments. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the 2019 and 2023 IMD Smart City Index reports, using Warsaw as a case study. The significance and originality of this study is in emphasising the challenge of assessing cities only based on their ranking. Instead, the objective is to assign more value to the individual factors studied in the ranking, consequently proposing a more direct comparison among them. The authors demonstrate how the alteration in methodology impacted Warsaw’s ranking position. Subsequently, a contrary trend was identified, rather than increasing as first suggested, Warsaw declined in the ranking, which corresponds to the worsening of most of the parameters examined in the research. Hence, the updated calculation methodology used in the IMD Smart City Index is more precise and may be regarded as a metric for assessing advancements in the search for smartness.