Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is well structured, but the analysis does not give enough emphasis to the role of energy companies.

In the analysis it is suggested to further highlight the role of the companies that manage the lighting systems, on behalf of the municipality, and who are directly involved in the purchase of smart lighting solutions.
There are two main aspects they evaluate:
1) The project must remain active for at least 10 years: innovative but recent companies in the market have less history to prove their quality in the long term. Warranty and trust is a key factor.
2) The project must lead to a significant energy reduction, which allows to reduce the overall ROI.

The large-scale diffusion of smart lighting systems are possibile through an endorsement by the energy company, which is responsible for the deploy and maintenance.
It is suggested to include the following article in the bibliography:
"Design, Deployment and Evolution of Heterogeneous Smart Public Lighting Systems (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/16/3281)
In particular, evaluating the new smart lighting trends, which increase the reduction in energy consumption (30-50%) through dynamic dimming approaches (Par. 4). New trends of smart lighting systems (as dynamic dimming with traffic flow and weather conditions) should be presented in the analysis, because they are the key to making those projects sustainable in terms of saving, without being funded only from public funds.

Author Response

Many thanks for your constructive evaluation and helpful suggestions.

First, you suggest "to further highlight the role of the companies that manage the lighting systems (...) which is responsible for the deploy and maintenance." You did not include any sources/references for the three specific suggestions you're making here regarding the role of energy companies, so it is difficult to integrate those specific requirements into our manuscript. Please also note that our empirical work was conducted in three different countries in North-Western Europe, but also included interviews in (potential follower) municipalities in several other countries. The roles and responsibilities for public lighting differ substantially across these countries. Ownership of the infrastructure can be in the hand of the municipality, the energy company, or another private company. Maintenance and operations can also vary: it is either done by a single company or by multiple partners. Therefore, we cannot become too specific on this topic. In this specific institutional context, the role of municipalities collaborating across regions and country borders is therefore quite pivotal. We acknowledged this limitation of our study, by inserting the following paragraph in section 7: "A key limitation of this study is that the empirical work was conducted in several countries in North-Western Europe. Our findings may therefore be biased towards this specific institutional setting. In this setting, for example, energy companies play a limited role in replicating SL projects across municipalities and regions. In other institutional settings, however, energy companies may play a more pivotal role."

In your second comment, you suggest including the following article: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/16/3281
We included this source and refer to it several times in the revised manuscript (e.g. in the revised Introduction section). Please also note our study focuses on the social/political/institutional dimension of replicating SL systems. In view of your second comment, we realized that we did not make this focus explicit enough. Therefore, we added a sentence to the Introduction section to explain that we "focus on the non-technical dimensions of enhancing the replication potential of SL systems, also because an extensive body of knowledge about the technical aspects of these systems is already available [10,11]."

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe that this work is very interesting and provides good methodological contributions to research in the smart cities.

Author Response

Many thanks for your positive evaluation of this manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

I have analysed this article which deals with the potential of Smart Lighting Projects

The authors discuss the pending problem of Smart Lighting Projects. This is interesting and increasingly demanded by communities, however, the research is made on a non-scientific or technical basis and it deals more with linguistic, psychologic or social studies. It could be necessary to augment the degree of perception of objectivity by introducing simulations, experiments or statistics to validate the design intentions of the authors.

The paper describes the background in a concise and satisfactory manner but not sufficiently scientific. Data on the performance or revenue of the proposed actions are lacking.  The output of the project can vary significantly for instance with oscillations on the energy market.

The statistical analysis on the proposed projects for SL is missing. One wonders if more insights could be gained from a 3D analysis of the neighbourhoods and networks and fixtures to be installed instead of just psychological terminology.

The results section is slightly insufficient in this sense and does not lead to intelligible conclusions.

The manuscript should be enhanced with more objectivity to continue the research and extend it to the real spaces in smart cities. A suggestion for new designs of the experiments is advised.

Summary of evaluation: This article is interesting and deals with useful matter for research on smart lighting proposals. Nevertheless, I identify relevant flaws in the procedures and results and I advise to the authors that major revisions are produced with this material in the manner expressed above.

Author Response

Many thanks for your constructive comments and suggestions regarding our manuscript. Below we outline how we've addressed each of your comments.

First, you write that our research "is made on a non-scientific or technical basis and it deals more with linguistic, psychologic or social studies. It could be necessary to augment the degree of perception of objectivity by introducing simulations, experiments or statistics to validate the design intentions of the authors." Notably, we draw on two bodies of scientific research in our paper: transition and management studies, as explained in detail in section 2. We're not drawing on linguistic or psychological work (as you suggest), except for section 4.3 which talks about the role of boundary objects in knowledge sharing.

We're somewhat confused about your comment that the type of work reported in sections 2 and 4 is "non-scientific or technical". Transition and management research are broadly accepted bodies of scientific research, in which indeed methods such as (mathematical) simulations and controlled experiments are hardly or not used; rather, transition and management research often draws on field work in which controlled experiments are considered to be either practically unfeasible or even unethical (e.g. Starbuck, W.H., The Production of Knowledge: The Challenge of Social Science Research, Oxford University Press, 2006). Instead, many studies in this area draw on qualitative (e.g. interview) data; see the various sources used in section 3 and the Appendix. Please also note that the design science methodology adopted in our study goes back to the pioneering work of Nobel prize-winner Herbert Simon (see section 3). In any case, your feedback does signal that the focus of our work is unclear, and therefore the revised Introduction section includes the following text:  "In this respect, we seek to identify the managerial and socio-political factors that can increase the embedded replication potential of SL projects, focusing especially on the replication potential among small and medium-sized municipalities in North-Western Europe. As such, we focus on the non-technical dimensions of enhancing the replication potential of SL systems, also because an extensive body of knowledge about the technical aspects of these systems is already available [10,11]."

The latter addition also serves to clarify that our study does not address (in any detail) the performance or revenue of the proposed SL system. Work on the technical requirements of the SL system was also done in the larger (EU-funded) SL program that our study is part of; but these performance issues are reported elsewhere.

In response to your comment that the "results section is slightly insufficient in this sense and does not lead to intelligible conclusions", we have improved the text in both section 5 and 6. In this respect, we also moved the summary of the findings of section 5 at the beginning of this section to a new subsection at the end of this section.

Your final comment is to enhance the manuscript "with more objectivity to continue the research and extend it to the real spaces in smart cities. A suggestion for new designs of the experiments is advised." We're evidently unable to adapt the research design of this completed study, but we did include the following limitation and recommendation for future research in section 7: "Another limitation is that the empirical part of this study only draws on qualitative data (analysis). Future work in this area should therefore adopt methods such as controlled experiments and simulation models to develop a more robust body of knowledge on the replication potential of SL and other smart city solutions."

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

This article has greatly improved and could be accepted in its current form.

 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper titled "Enhancing the Replication Potential of Public Smart Lighting Projects" tries to deal with the problem of achieving sustainable solutions in public. The problem is quite complex and has to be analyzed in many ways. This paper seems to be quite well written from the "management point of view ." However, it is hardly correct from the "engineering point of view ." In the Reviewer's opinion, it is the primary source of implementation not sustainable enough solution. The replication of the project can not be done in such a way without the proper analysis of technical standards, reports, and requirements connected with photometric, colorimetric, energy efficiency, and light pollution parameters for the given new case. Moreover, the "design principles" seem to be quite obvious or quite impropriate, e.g.:

DP2&3 – There is a trend in modern lighting technology to consider users' needs. It is necessary. However, the average person usually does not know what is needed. It is because modern (outdoor) lighting is quite complicated. It has to take, among others, into account the luminous environment, traffic safety, light pollution, electrical infrastructure, etc. Involving most citizens in such a process would be hard to do appropriately. In contrast, the proper law regulations that consider all crucial factors (e.g., technical parameters, proper design algorithm of a single project, impact on the environment) would be beneficial.  

DP6 seems to be a regular "law of supply and demand."

DP8 – Indeed, and that way, much public lighting is implemented without compliance with lighting standards, high investment costs, and no energy savings in the end.

DP10 – Who would be responsible for that? 

Section 5.1 is quite chaotic. What was the background of the selection of the municipalities and informants? Why those? Who answered what questions? Fig. 1 seems to be unnecessary at all.

L.792 – 797 – In general, LED lighting can be very energy-efficient. However, what about its impact on the environment? Sometimes the authorities of a municipality are not even aware of all the problems connected with this modern technology. So, relying on these needs seems to be impropriated.

L.1001-1104 – The Reviewer disagrees. The paper does not talk about energy saving and environmental impact at all. So, this conclusion is exaggerated

The paper is generally too wordy, and it is pretty hard to catch what it is all about. It means that many people will not read it. To conclude, the Reviewer thinks that this paper is unsuitable for the "MDPI Sustainability" journal and suggests it be rejected. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting subject matter, but the study needs refinement. 
1) there is a lack of research questions and hypotheses
2) there is a lack of a good study of the literature background in the context of smart solutions and the smart city
3) there is a lack of justification of the research method (in the light of literature and economic practice) 
4) reflections should be structured and subordinated to the chosen thought process - literature, methods, research - justification, conclusions