Page 8 - Case study: Smart Dubai Happiness Meter in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

on earth. The Smart Dubai initiative plays a key role in guiding and enabling the city’s ongoing digital
transformation across all sectors.

1.2. Challenge and response

The ambitious vision of making Dubai the happiest city on earth has mobilized Dubai entities, both
public and private sector, to undertake strategic initiatives under the leadership of Smart Dubai
Office. Happiness is not just a slogan in Dubai but it is at the core of its smart transformation (UAE is
the only country in the world with a Ministry of State for Happiness).

Achieving happiness is neither simple nor a straightforward task. On the contrary, it is quite
challenging to translate it into a city-wide policy with concrete goals, action items, incentives, and
indicators.

Smart Dubai launched the Happiness Agenda to fuel its city transformation to happiness. Smart
Dubai has adopted a globally unique, science-based and methodical approach to measure, impact,
and sustain happiness for the whole city.

Figure 2: Smart Dubai Happiness Agenda

One of the challenges was to collect timely (in fact on the spot) feedback from the users of city
services to measure their happiness regarding city services experience. Hence, Smart Dubai
launched a simple tool called Happiness Meter to measure city experiences happiness.

2 Smart Dubai Happiness Meter | Dubai, UAE