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The term smartness has been discussed in the academia for many years; prior research has listed numerous advantages and encouraged business entities to implement smart technologies. However, stakeholders’ knowledge level, support intention and barriers to smart technology have been under investigated. Without the support of stakeholders, smart projects can hardly be implemented. This paper aims to explore the above-mentioned under investigated area and identify the gaps between academia and the hotel industry in Taiwan.

In-depth interviews were conducted with nine hotel stakeholders in Taiwan with investors, owners, managers, technology suppliers and information technology consultants. Three key areas were focused on: smart hotel definition, expectations from smart hotel and known barriers for implementing smart technologies.

The definition of smart hotel among all stakeholders was inconsistent. Stakeholders defined a smart hotel according to their role in the organization: revenue boost, service customization, operations effectiveness and in-room automation. However, the key functions of smart technologies, such as interconnectivity and interoperability with business partners’ application (e.g. online travel agencies) and linkage to external Big data for accurate revenue forecast, were not mentioned by the interviewees. In addition, social media monitoring, robots and artificial intelligence were not mentioned during the interview.

This study attempted to identify Taiwanese hotel stakeholders’ perspective on smart hotel and to compare the outcome with academic research. The result indicated that there is a big gap in the definition of “smart hotel” among stakeholders and academia and reflected several barriers that prohibit hotel owners and investors in implementing smart systems.

This paper is premised upon an analysis of 26 cities within the UK regarding their smart city projects. Each city was analyzed through news articles, reports and policy documents to ascertain the level of each city's development as a smart city. Each was coded by separating the projects into five types, which were ranked on a scale from 0 (no plans for use) to 5 (project type in use). The most common types are the provision of open data and the creation of business ecosystems as the primary driver of the smart city. However, many councils and enterprises proclaim smartness before the technology is actually in use, making it difficult to separate what is utilised and what is under development. Therefore, this paper further carried out an analysis of 20 cities and their intended plans to usher in the smart city, to observe the expected emergence of smart city technology. This was achieved by interrogating various roadmaps and policy documents produced by the respective cities. It was found that the most prevalent form of emergent smart city technology is the rollout of 5G and increased educational programmes alongside a proliferation of internet of things and electric vehicle usage.

When integrating smart elements offered by emergent technologies, libraries are facing the challenges of technological renovation and maintaining their operation using emerging technology. Given the importance of smart library, new technologies are needed in building new libraries or renovation of existing libraries. The purpose of this paper is to propose a risk warning system for library construction or renovation in the aspect of risk management.

The proposed Internet of Things (IoT)-based system consists of sensors that automatically monitor the status of materials, equipment and construction activities in real time. AI techniques including case-based reasoning and fuzzy sets are applied.

The proposed system can easily track material flow and visualize construction processes. The experiment shows that the proposed system can effectively detect, monitor and manage risks in construction projects including library construction.

Compared with existing risk warning systems, the proposed IoT-based system requires less data for making dynamic predictions. The proposed system can be applied to new builds and renovation of libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how the intellectual capital (IC) approach and concepts could be fruitfully adapted to study the smart city phenomenon from a managerial point of view.

This study is based on a long-term, in-depth ethnographic exploration of the vast global community, which is created around the smart city movement.

The analysis suggests that, in order to effectively analyse a smart city context through the IC lens, the traditional IC framework needs to be extended for: expected outcomes, which should also include sustainability, resilience and quality of life; categories of key resources, which should also include institutional capital and environmental capital; units of analysis, which should also include territorial systems, such as transportation or waste; and key managerial challenges implied. As a final result, a smart city intellectual capital (SC-IC) framework is proposed.

Most of the cases analysed in this study are European; further studies are advisable to better investigate non-European smart city contexts.

The paper suggests that the knowledge management, project portfolio management and network management approaches are crucial to better support managerial practices in smart city organizations.

The SC-IC framework allows for a clear definition of the smart city organization, as a new knowledge-based, project-oriented, network-shaped type of organization. Therefore, the SC-IC framework provides smart city research with a consistent rooting in management studies. Further, this paper contributes to the fourth stage of IC research.

Smart cities show a “booming” trend both in the academia and the industry in recent years. Scholars across the world have been investigating how new technologies are applied to develop new services to the inhabitants and cities all over the world also address the “smart cities” challenges by promoting policymaking and governance. This paper aims to conduct in-depth research on smart cities by combining the study of governance policy study and information technology study.

This paper empirically mapped the trends of smart city development, outstanding scholars and hot topics about smart cities by analyzing important references using CiteSpace. The authors visualized references and topics to analyze smart city research, based on empirical data from Web of Science. Furthermore, two most important research branches – topics from smart city governance research and those from information systems (IS) research were studied, respectively.

First, the authors mapped the development of research and divided the development into three different stages. Second, the authors explored important, influential and instructive publications and publications’ attributes including authors, institutions, journals and topics. Third, the authors found there are different characteristics between the IS group and the governance group in publication situations, influential institutions, journals and authors, although the research points of the two branches are overlapping and fragmented. Finally, the authors proposed important topics, which include “internet of things (IoT)”, “big data”, “smart city systems” and “smart city management” and the authors predicted that “IoT” and “smart city challenge” would be future trends in recent years.

This study is an innovative research of its category because it visualized the development of smart city research, analyzed both governance and technology branches of smart city research synthetically using CiteSpace and forecasted future trends of smart city research by topics analysis and visualization of evolution.

Current literature recognised big data as a digital revolution affecting all organisational processes. To obtain a competitive advantage from the use of big data, an efficient integration in a performance measurement system (PMS) is needed, but it is still a “great challenge” in performance measurement research. This paper aims to review the big data and performance measurement studies to identify the publications’ trends and future research opportunities.

The authors reviewed 873 documents on big data and performance carrying out an extensive bibliometric analysis using two main techniques, i.e. performance analysis and science mapping.

Results point to a significant increase in the number of publications on big data and performance, highlighting a shortage of studies on business, management and accounting areas, and on how big data can improve performance measurement. Future research opportunities are identified. They regard the development of further research to explain how performance measurement field can effectively integrate big data into a PMS and describe the main themes related to big data in performance measurement literature.

This paper gives a holistic view of big data and performance measurement research through the inclusion of numerous contributions on different research streams. It also encourages further study for developing concrete tools.

This paper aims to explain the development of an online training curriculum to enable students to acquire the transversal competences needed to work on smart cities projects. In this curriculum, a modern approach to the teaching-learning process was applied, suitable for the interdisciplinary and multinational learning challenges that smart cities impose, but within the framework of a university-industry European partnership.

To develop the curriculum, the competences needed for smart cities, common to all disciplines and fields, had to be researched. In addition, real smart cities projects also had to be selected for work following a project-based learning methodology. For both, this study applied the Delphi method, selecting the most relevant ones based on the data obtained by performing a multi-criteria decision analysis.

The procedure followed for the identification of transversal competences in a field, the design of an innovative online training program and the results of the first edition of the program are discussed.

The processes that were developed, both to detect the most relevant transversal competences and to design the online training program, could be extrapolated to other areas. Moreover, it is very likely that the competences detected in this work could also be extrapolated, for the most part, to interdisciplinary teams.

To date, there is no European initiative addressing the challenges of smart cities that requires a major adjustment in higher education, in the relationship between universities and all the mechanisms of lifelong learning with the industry related to smart cities. This work is a pioneer in this regard.

A cyber world (CW) is a digitized world created on cyberspaces inside computers interconnected by networks including the Internet. Following ubiquitous computers, sensors, e‐tags, networks, information, services, etc., is a road towards a smart world (SW) created on both cyberspaces and real spaces. It is mainly characterized by ubiquitous intelligence or computational intelligence pervasion in the physical world filled with smart things. In recent years, many novel and imaginative researches have been conducted to try and experiment a variety of smart things including characteristic smart objects and specific smart spaces or environments as well as smart systems. The next research phase to emerge, we believe, is to coordinate these diverse smart objects and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level of spaces known as smart hyperspace or hyper‐environments, and eventually create the smart world. In this paper, we discuss the potential trends and related challenges toward the smart world and ubiquitous intelligence from smart things to smart spaces and then to smart hyperspaces. Likewise, we show our efforts in developing a smart hyperspace of ubiquitous care for kids, called UbicKids.

The purpose of this paper was to identify the main necessary competences for smart cities’ development. From their inception until now, smart cities are striving to clarify their identity and become better, and thus, smarter. The whole process is in many ways similar to the journey of a child in his quest of growing into a smart adult, with the help of parents and support from educators. But it is not easy to tell how we, as citizens, through civic, educational and governance structures, raise smart cities. What competences do we need? This was the main question for the present essay, generated from several theoretical and practical experiences.

In this study, literature analysis, synthesis and theoretical inferences, for the smart city problematiques, and induction and exploratory qualitative analysis, for soft, civilizational competences, were used.

The main conclusion is that the literature still associates the smart city especially with its hard dimension, the highly developed and intelligent technologies, including information and communication technologies (ICTs), despite a growing number of studies dedicated to the soft, human and social capital component. The intangible, soft component – the human actor – plays an equally, if not even more important role, through mechanisms affecting all classical dimensions of smart cities (smart economy, people, governance, mobility, environment, living). Civilizational competences, soft skills or human-related characteristics of cities strongly influenced by culture (at national, regional, organizational and individual levels) are crucial for the development of smart and competitive cities. Civilizational competences are grouped into four categories: enterprise culture, discoursive culture, civic culture and daily culture. If we want to make our cities smart, we need to develop these competences – first define them, then identify their antecedents or influence factors and measure them.

The study has several limits. First, the exploratory nature in itself, with many inductive and abductive suppositions that will need further testing. Second, the literature selection has a certain degree of subjectivity owing to the fact that besides the common, classical theory of smart cities, the authors were particularly interested in rather heterodox opinions about the subject, which lead them to the inclusion of singular or isolated points of view on narrower issues.

The findings of this exploratory conceptual essay could be used for further testing of hypotheses on the relationship between civilizational competences and smart cities’ development.

Local and regional administrations could use the results to increase civil society’s involvement in the development of smart cities.

The study points out some new connections and relations for the smart city problematiques, and explicitly suggests relating the development of smart cities to the development of civilizational competences, as a complex category of factors going beyond the unique dimension of “people” or “human and social capital” from the smart cities literature. It is an exploratory outcome, generating new research hypotheses for the relationships between smart city development and culture-related factors grouped under the “cities” civilizational competences’ label.

The advent of digitalization and the trend of social distancing coincide with the individualized lifestyle that is emerging among contemporary shoppers. This study explores the unique market of “smart solo shoppers”. Two empirical studies are conducted, which aim to identify the major dimensions of multi-channel shopping activities that are engaged by the shoppers (Study 1, n = 64) and to differentiate the shoppers' valuation of time invested in the distinct dimensions under different cultural influences (Study 2, n = 519).

A survey questionnaire is used for data collection, and data are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results reveal that the shopping activities converge into four principal dimensions: offline shopping, online shopping, post-shopping delivery and product return activities. Shoppers who perceive offline shopping activities as a time burden and online shopping and delivery activities as venues of value creation are more strongly self-identified as smart solo shoppers. Furthermore, smart solo shoppers who are under a strong influence of individualistic culture are found to spend time on multi-channel shopping to make the right purchase the first time, whereas shoppers perceiving being in a weak individualistic culture prefer to engage online channels while being prepared to return the unwanted purchases.

This study highlights an emerging research field in the nexus of solo consumption and smart shopping. Emphasizing the utility-driven and ego-expressive nature of smart solo shoppers, the authors provide an initial profile of these shoppers based on their time-valuation patterns and the contextual impacts of individualistic culture.