Grand challenges, corporate legitimacy, and community integration: an integrative smart technology model

By referring to the smart city industry, this research studies how commercial firms gain legitimacy when their products aim to address grand challenges. Despite the reputation of giant technology companies and the overall legitimacy they enjoy in technology markets, exploiting opportunities in social contexts connected to grand challenges requires a societal-oriented approach. Firms that engaged in smart cities initially approached cities with a business-as-usual approach, to be met with sharp criticism from local communities and pressure groups. In response, firms had to redraw their strategies to include communities in the process to stay close to local reality. This paper theorizes the process and highlights an Integrative Smart Technology Model (ISTM) to narrate how firms strategically include communities in the planning process and gain legitimacy for the technologies

Blended Value Creation: The Mediating Role of Competences

Research on prosocial entrepreneurship so far has focused either on ex-ante motives to create prosocial enterprises or on ex-post strategies to protect mission orientation. Surprisingly little is known about the prosocial entrepreneurial competences that help acquire resources to create blended value once a venture has been established. To fill this gap, this article presents a qualitative study in an Indian setting that shows how prosocial entrepreneurs adopt three types of competences to assemble resources when they establish their ventures

Contributions of Smart City Solutions and Technologies to Resilience against the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review

Since its emergence in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept through many cities around the world, claiming millions of lives and causing major socio-economic impacts. The pandemic occurred at an important historical juncture when smart solutions and technologies have become ubiquitous in many cities. Against this background, in this review, we examine how smart city solutions and technologies have contributed to resilience by enhancing planning, absorption, recovery, and adaptation abilities. For this purpose, we reviewed 147 studies that have discussed issues related to the use of smart solutions and technologies during the pandemic. The results were synthesized under four themes, namely, planning and preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation. This review shows that investment in smart city initiatives can enhance the planning and preparation ability. In addition, the adoption of smart solutions and technologies can, among other things, enhance the capacity of cities to predict pandemic patterns, facilitate an integrated and timely response, minimize or postpone transmission of the virus, provide support to overstretched sectors, minimize supply chain disruption, ensure continuity of basic services, and offer solutions for optimizing city operations. These are promising results that demonstrate the utility of smart solutions for enhancing resilience. However, it should be noted that realizing this potential hinges on careful attention to important issues and challenges related to privacy and security, access to open-source data, technological affordance, legal barriers, technological feasibility, and citizen engagement. Despite this, this review shows that further development of smart city initiatives can provide unprecedented opportunities for enhancing resilience to the pandemic and similar future events

Not everything is as it seems: digital technology affordance, pandemic control, and the mediating role of sociomaterial arrangements

An overly favorable narrative has developed around the role played by digital technologies in containing Covid-19, which oversimplifies the complexity of technology adoption. This narrative takes sociomaterial arrangements for granted and conceptualizes technology affordance - the problem-solving capability of a technology - as a standard built-in feature that automatically activates during technology deployment, leading to undiversified and predetermined collective benefits. This paper demonstrates that not everything is as it seems; implementing a technology is a necessary but insufficient condition for triggering its potential problem-solving capability. The potential affordance and effects of a technology are mediated by the sociomaterial arrangements that users assemble to connect their goals to the materiality of technological artifacts and socio-organizational context in which technology deployment takes place. To substantiate this argument and illustrate the mediating role of sociomaterial arrangements, we build on sociomateriality and technology affordance theory, and we present the results of a systematic review of Covid-19 literature in which 2187 documents are examined. The review combines text data mining, co-occurrence pattern recognition, and inductive coding, and it focuses on four digital technologies that public authorities have deployed as virus containment measures: infrared temperature-sensing devices; ICT-based surveillance and contact-tracing systems; bioinformatic tools and applications for laboratory testing; and electronic mass communications media. Reporting on our findings, we add nuances to the academic debate on sociomateriality, technology affordance, and the governance of technology in public health crises. In addition, we provide public authorities with practical recommendations on how to strengthen their approach to digital technology deployment for pandemic control

Bridging the digital divide in Africa via universal service funds: an institutional theory perspective

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence-based policy recommendations for improving the implementation of universal service funds (USF) with a view to closing the digital divide in Africa. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a qualitative approach that draws examples from various African countries supported by 25 interviews from key stakeholders with hands-on experience and roles that shape telecommunications policy in Africa and other developing countries. Findings The study's findings point out that institutional voids which characterize several African countries inhibit the effectiveness of USF in African countries. The authors identify several institutional and organisational factors and explain how they negatively affect the performance of USF. The authors find that in order to overcome these obstacles, there is a need for a clear redefinition of Universal Access and Service (UAS) policies, restructuring the governance of USF, encouraging cross-sectoral collaborations, and bottom-up initiatives to bridge the digital divide in African countries. Originality/value The paper contributes to the underexplored USF literature by shedding light on the role of institutional factors in determining the success of USF. The paper thus complements and provides a different perspective on promoting digital inclusion in Africa from the viewpoint of institutional voids, bringing new insights into the existing literature on how to deal with an intractable area of UAS policy and the wider digital divide debate in developing countries

Bridging the digital divide in Africa via universal service funds: An institutional perspective

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence-based policy recommendations for improving the implementation of universal service funds (USF) with a view to closing the digital divide in Africa. Design/methodology/approach: The paper adopts a qualitative approach that draws examples from various African countries supported by 25 interviews from key stakeholders with hands-on experience and roles that shape telecommunications policy in Africa and other developing countries. Findings: The study's findings point out that institutional voids which characterize several African countries inhibit the effectiveness of USF in African countries. The authors identify several institutional and organisational factors and explain how they negatively affect the performance of USF. The authors find that in order to overcome these obstacles, there is a need for a clear redefinition of Universal Access and Service (UAS) policies, restructuring the governance of USF, encouraging cross-sectoral collaborations, and bottom-up initiatives to bridge the digital divide in African countries. Originality/value: The paper contributes to the underexplored USF literature by shedding light on the role of institutional factors in determining the success of USF. The paper thus complements and provides a different perspective on promoting digital inclusion in Africa from the viewpoint of institutional voids, bringing new insights into the existing literature on how to deal with an intractable area of UAS policy and the wider digital divide debate in developing countries