Co-creating a smart tourism local service system in rural areas: a case study from south

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementThe most recent trends show an increase in the urbanization of cities, and, consequently, inner territories become more depopulated, business activities get closed, services get reduced and the overall services become poor and not able to offer quality offers to visitors (Bolay, 2020). According to (United Nations, 2019), by 2050 more than three out of four people will be living in urban areas. Nowadays, many studies have addressed the evolution and features of Smart Cities (Van Dijk & Teuben, 2015) and tourism is also one of those spheres that got digitally transformed by Smart Cities (Khan, Woo, Nam, & Chathoth, 2017). One of the features of smart applications is the possibility to let the user be a driver of value in creating and sharing contents (Kontogianni & Alepis, 2020). However, the explosion of smart solutions enabled by the latest technological innovations has been mostly contextualized in urban environments while fewer solutions have been developed in less urbanized rural areas (Steyn & Johanson, 2010). The methodology used employs the merging of two of the core contemporary service research approaches: Service Science and Service-Dominant logic; the first offers an organizational framework to generate and integrate value co-creation in terms of a smart service systems (Polese, Botti, Grimaldi, Monta & Vesci, 2018). For the same purpose, but differently, the second proposes a different layout called service ecosystems (Vargo & Lusch, 2016). This combination of approaches overcomes individual model limitations by setting an integrated model that can be employed to hypercompetitive and experience-based sectors (Polese, Botti, Grimaldi, Monta & Vesci, 2018), and that was adopted by using a case study methodology, relying on semi-structured interviews

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

Cultural heritage appraisal by visitors to global cities: the use of social media and urban analytics in urban buzz research

An attractive cultural heritage is an important magnet for visitors to many cities nowadays. The present paper aims to trace the constituents of the destination attractiveness of 40 global cities from the perspective of historical-cultural amenities, based on a merger of extensive systematic databases on these cities. The concept of cultural heritage buzz is introduced to highlight: (i) the importance of a varied collection of urban cultural amenities; (ii) the influence of urban cultural magnetism on foreign visitors, residents and artists; and (iii) the appreciation for a large set of local historical-cultural amenities by travelers collected from a systematic big data set (emerging from the global TripAdvisor platform). A multivariate and econometric analysis is undertaken to validate and test the quantitative picture of the above conceptual framework, with a view to assess the significance of historical-cultural assets and socio-cultural diversity in large urban agglomerations in the world as attraction factors for visitors. The results confirm our proposition on the significance of urban cultural heritage as a gravity factor for destination choices in international tourism in relation to a high appreciation for historical-cultural amenities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tendencias de investigación en tecnología en el contexto de los destinos turísticos inteligentes: un análisis y visualización de red bibliométricos

[EN] Information and communication technologies play a critical role in tourism, providing benefits such as improvement in tourism experiences, co-creation of value, and promotion of the marketing of relationships and phygital experiences, where online and offline environments are combined. In recent years, tourism planning and management through smart destinations has aroused great academic interest by including the dimensions of governance, sustainability, accessibility, innovation, and technology. This work aims to analyse and to visualize the scientific production associated with technology in the context of smart destinations. For this, evaluative and relational bibliometric analysis techniques were applied to the bibliographic data of 395 articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science up to September 2021. The results indicate that there is considerable growth and that a number of authors, countries, and leading institutions contribute significantly to scientific knowledge. In addition, using two bibliometric software tools, VOSviewer and SciMAT, a co-citation network of authors was built to describe their intellectual structure, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to identify the main thematic areas. The motor themes that drive the research are the conceptualization of tourist destinations, innovation, and data, while experience is a crosscutting theme. Additionally, some limitations and applications of the research are discussed, as well as the practical implications for destination management.[ES] Las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación juegan un importante papel en el turismo aportando beneficios como la mejora de las experiencias turísticas, la co-creación de valor e impulsando el marketing de relaciones y las experiencias phygital, donde se unen los entornos online y offline. En los últimos años, la planificación y gestión turística a través de los destinos inteligentes ha despertado un gran interés académico, al incluir las dimensiones de gobernanza, sostenibilidad, accesibilidad, innovación y tecnología. Este trabajo se plantea como objetivo analizar y visualizar la producción científica asociada a la tecnología en el contexto de los destinos inteligentes. Para ello, se han aplicado técnicas de análisis bibliométrico evaluativas y relacionales a los datos bibliográficos de 395 artículos indexados en Scopus y en Web of Science hasta septiembre de 2021. Los resultados indican que existe un crecimiento considerable y que una serie de autores, países e instituciones líderes contribuyen significativamente al conocimiento científico. Además, utilizando de forma complementaria dos herramientas de softwarebibliométrico, VOSviewer y SciMAT, se ha construido una red de co-citación de autores para describir su estructura intelectual y un análisis de co-ocurrencia de palabras clave para identificar las principales áreas temáticas. Los temas motores que impulsan la investigación son la conceptualización de los destinos turísticos, la innovación y los datos, mientras que la experiencia es un tema transversal. Adicionalmente, se discuten algunas limitaciones y aplicaciones de la investigación, así como las implicaciones prácticas para la gestión de los destinos

Application of Image Analytics for Disaster Response in Smart Cities

Post-disaster, city planners need to effectively plan response activities and assign rescue teams to specific disaster zones quickly. We address the problem of lack of accurate information of the disaster zones and existence of human survivors in debris using image analytics from smart city data. Innovative usage of smart city infrastructure is proposed as a potential solution to this issue. We collected images from earthquake-hit smart urban environments and implemented a CNN model for classification of these images to identify human body parts out of the debris. TensorFlow backend (using Keras) was utilized for this classification. We were able to achieve 83.2% accuracy from our model. The novel application of image data from smart city infrastructure and the resultant findings from our model has significant implications for effective disaster response operations, especially in smart cities

Understanding the Trends of European Startup Ecosystems

The world faces numerous crises, being the economic and financial crisis, the more worrying crisis and which people become more aware, to find solutions to various problems, namely unemployment, especially youth unemployment. Throughout the evolution of the world, entrepreneurship phenomenon went hand in hand with economic and technological development, providing new businesses with innovative concepts, responding to people's needs. Today, entrepreneurship continues to be important to the economies, as it adds new companies with value by presenting people with talent, with creative sense and innovative products and services. With technological development and financial assistance from investors or government, we have witnessed an exponential growth of startups over the past few years. Entrepreneurial education also encouraged this development, presenting conferences and workshops, calling students to innovation, creating your own startup. In reply to the growth and development of European ecosystems, this research work was developed to analyze the reality of European ecosystems. The aim is to understand whether there are trends in choosing economic sectors, business models and pricing models. This investigation is composed by an extensive literature review to startups and startup ecosystem and by an empirical study to startups’ perception concerning to this subject. To acquire empirical data it was conducted an online questionnaire directed to a sample of startups registered on online platform. This study confirmed the existence of trends by information gathered from online platform and the online questionnaire. It is proposed a recommendation, which will help to continue the investigations concerning to this subject

Measuring the progress of smart destinations: The use of indicators as a management tool

This paper aims at developing and applying an indicators system for smart tourism destinations in order to better understand the current situation of a set of destinations which are developing smart tourism policies. The indicators were developed by adapting existing indicators in tourism destination management and smart cities literature, creating a new system based on a smart destination theoretical model that establishes three interrelated levels in which smart destinations are grounded: strategic-relational, instrumental and applied levels. Within these levels, nine different dimensions to be measured were identified. The indicators were constructed in collaboration with a public organisation (INVAT.TUR) devoted to providing technical assistance to smart destinations and were pre-tested, readjusted and then applied to a set of destinations of the Region of Valencia (Spain). Obtained findings reveal an uneven performance of destinations in the different dimensions of the three levels. A notable performance is observed in indicators for connectivity and online marketing, while more efforts need to be done in accessibility and sustainability initiatives. However, disparities are evident between different indicators and destinations. These results are discussed and framed within the relevant literature on smart destinations while providing information for destination managers and policy makers to adapt and replicate these indicators in their own territories. This paper is a first attempt to develop and apply indicators to measure smart destinations progress in literature and therefore constitutes an important precedent for future studies.Work supported by the Spanish National R&D&I Plan financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant CSO2017-82592-R (“Analysis of planning processes applied to smart cities and tourist destinations. Balance and proposal of a new methodology: Smart Tourism Planning”)