Integrating community value into the adoption framework: A systematic review of conceptual research on participatory smart city applications

Highlights

• Citizens are invited to adopt and use the Smart City Services applications.

• Citizens' involvement in finding solutions for local problems led to their empowerment.

• Framework of technology adoption should include community value as predictor.

• Study understand benefits of adopting technology beyond individuals and organizations.

• Theories expand into the motivation scope to measure the stimulus for community benefits.

Abstract

Despite the priority on how to implement effective and digitally inclusive technologies for citizens in smart city context, research streams fail to provide direction on what will motivate citizens to adopt them. Research scholarship has focused on technology adoptions frameworks without discussing the role of user-centric community value. The present paper attempts to do a systematic literature review and proposes an adoption conceptual framework that integrates community value thought in the context of participatory smart city applications, Online Participatory Technologies (OPT). Based on an extensive literature review, a summary of supportive and preventive factors in adopting user-centric technologies have been synthesized. Accordingly, the integration of community values as determinants of OPT adoption has been discussed. From a broader perspective, the present paper contributes to citizen's technology adoption literature in the smart city context by discussing the role of community value in the form of benefiting the adoption framework. The implications for smart city developers have been discussed. The main contribution of this paper is expanding the adoption framework to include community value-driven factors for OPT adoption and diffusion.

Introduction

The smart city is viewed as a public-private ecosystem with a citizen-centric focus that comprises government, planners, industry, non-profit organizations, and citizens (Ju et al., 2018). Managing smart cities are highly complex and involves two objectives, one, is to improve their services by applying new collaborative service approaches that increase economic efficiencies and the other is to expand stakeholder expectations within social structures that involve quality of life and sustainability (Aguilera et al., 2017). These goals (economic and social) call for some capacity to perform better are not only reliant on the efforts of the government or planning institutions but also the support given by the citizens (Aguilera et al., 2017; Wirtz et al., 2021). One of the major citizen-centric innovative initiatives is that citizens are invited to adopt and use the Smart City Services applications that can facilitate citizens' direct involvement in finding solutions for local problems. This is evidenced through the rise in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as Internet of Things (IoT) based online participatory technologies (OPT) for engaging the citizens (Afzalan et al., 2017; Ju et al., 2018). The present work focuses on OPT, which is a platform-based ecosystem that engages multiple actors in smart city ecosystem.

Citizen engagement is possible when citizens are asked to participate in co-production (Allen et al., 2020). Similarly, their involvement to participate in the collection of a smart city's data leads to further empowerment and benefits for all (Degbelo et al., 2016; Ju et al., 2018). Many have succumbed to using participatory tools like FixMyStreet, FixMyTransport, Open City Toolkit, Open IDEO, Mind Mixer, ClickFix, and Crowdbrite (Aguilera et al., 2017). These tools combined the participatory context of citizens with analytical ability to report problems and form an integrative heterogeneous infrastructure facilities for city services (Kopackova and Komarkova, 2020). While introduction of OPT are increasingly gaining popularity among the smart city authority, the success rate of OPT adoption among citizens is slow and demand as important area to investigate (Shihab and Hidayanto, 2021). Much of the scholarship within this realm lies in technology adoption and technology diffusion drivers were investigated only from technology driven perspectives. While some studies examined the effect of government influences (Bagloee et al., 2021; Devlin, 2020; Shareeda et al., 2021), less emphasis has been given to exploring the citizen or user-centric aspects in respect to the unique nature of the technology implementation purposes and expected outcomes.

We found that in general existing studies overlooked to foresee the solutions to the challenges in adopting user centric technologies namely OPT in smart city context. Tornatzky and Fleischer (1990) revealed that technology-organization-environment framework is useful for understanding successful adoption and implementation of the technology as the framework helps in recognizing the difference in the functional necessities of adoption. The successful adoption of technologies varies according to various factors such as technology competencies, providers' support, government interventions, and user involvement (Chatterjee and Kar, 2018; Devlin, 2020; Kopackova and Komarkova, 2020; Tomor et al., 2021). For participatory technologies, the support and involvement of users are more important, and it is crucial to understand this from the functional perspective of the technology in terms of benefiting the individual and the community. It is a bigger challenge when there is not enough communication or support from planning organizations and designers to add value by explaining the functional and emotional outcomes of the technologies for users. Hence, to truly streamline the adoption process of a participatory smart city applications such as OPT that has been developed for the benefit of the people and the community, it is crucial to understand what exactly the citizens in the form of end users want, whether they are ready to use the technology for the benefit of the community, what may influence them to adopt and continuously use the technology, and how their needs or experiences in using the technology for the community can be supported.

The present work tries to contribute to citizen's technology adoption literature in smart city context by investigating why and when citizens will be motivated to adopt user-centric technologies (i.e., OPT) beyond the common adoption attributes. We answer this research question by revealing that it is community value that motivates citizens to get engaged and which in turn motivate them to adopt user-centric technologies. We argue that perceived benefits in the form of community value motivate citizens in adopting novel technologies in smart city. Citizens see perceived benefits in the form of community value, which can be extracted through “sense of community” that can be activated because of “social personality” and “social interaction”. So, when citizens think about contributing to the well-being of others, their acting as per their social personality beliefs (Miller and Campbell, 2008) and their practice of engaging in social interaction, can motivate them to adopt OPT and contribute towards community upliftment. This current work is the response to the call by Macke et al. (2019), implant sense of community in smart sustainable cities vision by exploring the prospect from OPT context.

We used an integrative conceptual framework and a systematic literature review approach to identify the studied factors that drive user-centric IoT adoption and to reveal the challenges in accelerating OPT adoption and diffusion in the context of smart city. The literature review approach helped in understanding what we already know about literature on technology adoption factors in smart city context and what we need to know. What we already know part has been summarized in the form of literature synthesize (please refer to Table 1 and Table 2) by using PRISMA framework, whereas what we need to know part has been elaborated in “scope extension” (5 Expanding the scope: extracting community value, 6 Solutions for OPT adoption and diffusion in a smart city ecosystem). In doing so, we referred to the literature of user-centric IoT adoption since it is a broad technology and OPT is a specific form of user-centric IoT. This paper has three objectives: (1) to explore the focus of research in published articles on theme adoption in user-centric IoT (incl. OPT) within smart city context, (2) to identify gaps in the current user-centric IoT adoption framework and make suggestions to expand the scope for OPT, and (3) to recommend solutions for OPT adoption and diffusion in a smart city ecosystem. To achieve the objectives of the paper, 75 journal articles on user-centric IoT including OPT were identified and analyzed. The outcome of the analysis is a conceptual and theoretical recommendations to expand the scope of user-centric adoption to include community value. The current paper provides an agenda for future research to explore and validate the inclusion of community value in adoption studies.