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
