This paper applies the multilevel perspective (MLP) theory to investigate how collective identities influence sector-wide digital transformations, focusing on the cooperative sector in Europe. By employing a wide mix of primary and secondary data from platform and incumbent cooperatives, our analysis showed that collective identities facilitate sector-wide digital transformations by mobilizing resources and enhancing the legitimacy of niche innovations. However, they can also act as a source of friction across the different phases theorized by the MLP. Drawing on these findings, we propose a novel framework that links the influence of collective identities with overarching narratives framing digital transformation as either a threat, an inevitable tendency, or an opportunity to reaffirm collective identities. In addition to expanding current theorization on the role of collective identities, narratives, and intermediaries in sociotechnical transitions, our analysis urges managers and intermediary organizations to take the lead on the co-creation of sector-specific digital transformation narratives, reconciling collective identities with transition processes (and vice versa).

Background: Digital services are increasingly used in healthcare; however, access to these services may be hindered by several factors. People residing in rural areas may face additional challenges. Rural digital healthcare access is a complex and interdisciplinary topic; to what extent this complexity is captured and theorised in extant research remains unclear. Aim: We aimed to review the theoretical approaches used in previous studies on digital healthcare access in rural areas, specifically to identify the frameworks used and the application of intersectionality. Methods: We searched MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL Plus, and Scopus for literature related to digital health access in rural areas in high-income countries. Search results were screened, extracted, and analysed with basic content analysis. Results: We included 101 studies in the analysis. Conceptual frameworks came from research fields of technology acceptance, healthcare access, and implementation research. The most used frameworks were the Technology Acceptance Model, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, Andersen’s behavioural model, Levesque’s patient-centred framework, and the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research. Forty-two studies focused on populations with some intersecting inequities, but none mentioned intersectionality specifically. Conclusion: All frameworks have their own limitations, especially when crossing disciplines in the specific rural context. We urge researchers to acknowledge these limitations and consider interdisciplinary frameworks. There is a need to theoretically approach the issue of inequity in this topic, and we recommend using equity-based frameworks for a comprehensive and intersectional understanding.

This study investigates the extent to which collaborative platforms contribute to strengthening the collaborative governance capacity of municipal governments, focusing on smart city development as an empirical context. Drawing on survey data from 289 municipal government officials and using a multinomial logit model, we test eight hypotheses linking collaborative platforms to key dimensions of collaborative governance: knowledge sharing, innovation culture, competences, strategic orientation, monitoring, vertical and internal coordination, and decision-making power. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that such platforms are uniformly beneficial. While their presence might support some collaborative governance dimensions, their contribution is less certain in others. Moreover, in some cases, our data shows that municipalities managing collaborative governance initiatives by means of a collaborative platform might perform just as well or even worse than those without one. These results suggest that expectations about collaborative platforms should be more carefully calibrated. By critically examining the contribution of collaborative platforms across key dimensions of collaborative governance, this study advances theoretical understanding and offers actionable insights for municipal platform managers and policymakers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has further evidenced the potential of grassroots actors as initiators of digital innovations, in the form of open-source applications, platform cooperatives, and other crowdsourced digital artifacts. These innovations played a crucial role in mitigating the impact of lockdown measures, specifically serving the needs of communities often neglected by commercial offerings from large tech companies. Grassroots digital innovations (GDIs) have long been recognized by scholars and policymakers as potential remedies to market distortions and social iniquities within digitalization processes. Nevertheless, these initiatives have historically struggled to become sustainable. Recent evidence confirms that many GDIs developed in response to the global health crisis are now facing financial issues that threaten their survival. In this commentary, we reflect on this challenge and assert that GDI literature exhibits several shortcomings that contribute to undermining the long-term stability of these initiatives and their capacity to foster more inclusive, just, and sustainable digitalization processes. We examine how these shortcomings can be addressed to enhance both GDI research and practice. Our discussion focuses on three major methodological and conceptual limitations: a tendency towards theory-devoid empiricism, a bias towards successful cases, and a dearth of longitudinal, multi-site analyses. We discuss the causes of each shortcoming and illustrate how they impact both the theoretical and practical development of GDIs. Drawing on this critical examination, we identify four priorities to advance future GDI research: leveraging methodological pluralism, applying theoretical sampling, enhancing qualitative longitudinal research, and strengthening methods for data collection and archival. These priorities aim to inform the agendas of academic communities, funding bodies, and policy institutions dedicated to harnessing the potential of GDIs for more sustainable and inclusive digitalization processes.

Place-based leadership (PBL) is critical to the economic and social vitality of places, as it emphasises collaboration, shared visions, and the mobilisation of human agency and collective action. While emotions are increasingly recognised as central to PBL, their role remains underexplored. This study investigates the case of the Valle dei Cavalieri cooperative in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy, to examine how PBL fosters the emergence of a community-based enterprise. We highlight the role of interaction rituals and collective effervescence in channelling emotions into collective action. Our findings contribute to the PBL literature, particularly regarding sustainable local development and rural resilience.

Governance inefficiencies threaten the potential of smart city projects to deliver equitable urban transformations. Current strategies often hinder implementation, and risk harmful technological effects on communities. Tackling this challenge demands urgent reforms to better integrate scientific insights into smarter governance practices.

Smart city technologies provide promising solutions for local governments to tackling societal challenges and enhancing public service provision. The global embrace of these digital innovations represents a new era in public sector advancements. However, it has also brought to light difficulties that existing public sector innovation (PSI) theories struggle to address. One key issue is the lack of comprehensive knowledge regarding the most critical barriers to implementing smart city projects and their intensity. We address this knowledge gap with a systematic literature review within the smart city domain, focusing on literature reporting on the barriers that local governments commonly encounter. This effort has culminated in the development of a conceptual framework that categorize smart city project barriers, forming a taxonomy that builds on and expand the most recent development in the PSI literature. This study contributes to PSI theory refinement by offering a more nuanced understanding of the barriers that local governments might experience when attempting to sustain digital innovation efforts. Moreover, this insight into PSI dynamics is a valuable resource for local governments as they seek to devise realistic mitigation strategies tailored to local development needs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, grassroots digital innovations (GDIs) have gained traction as innovation niches, providing an alternative to the prevailing mainstream regime dominating smart city transitions. Drawing upon interviews with experts and promoters of GDIs from 12 European countries, we explore the relationships between these initiatives and mainstream regime actors. Five distinct types of niche-regime interactions have emerged from the analysis: inertia, indirect support, antagonism, direct support, and active collaboration. These interactions do not follow a linear and incremental trajectory, but rather represent dynamic configurations that change over time and at different geographic scales. Consequently, our findings contribute to the literature on socio-technical transitions and grassroots innovation by further revealing the multidimensionality and multiscalarity of mainstream regimes. In light of these findings, we urge scholars and practitioners to reconsider how information flows and power imbalances among local and supralocal actors in mainstream regimes influence the development of innovation niches and dictate the pace of socio-technical transitions.

This study focuses on digital platform cooperatives (DPCs) and investigates how social value is created within platform cooperativism for fostering a more equitable and inclusive digital landscape. We explore and theorise the outcomes of social value creation by DPCs and identify the generative mechanisms that drive their emergence. We do this by adopting a Critical Realism philosophical stance, in combination with Grounded Theory techniques based on the Straussian version of coding. Our data is drawn from 36 interviews with DPC (co‐)founders, members, and experts, alongside an array of documentary data from DPCs across 12 European countries. Our analysis reveals three outcomes of social value creation by DPCs: strengthening community capacities, federating cooperative ventures, and fostering practices for narrative co‐creation. Additionally, we identify two generative mechanisms with enduring properties and explanatory power: collective identity and empowerment, and government‐community symbiosis. These mechanisms are identified through retroductive theorising, offering plausible explanations for the outcomes of social value creation, situated within relevant contextual conditions, such as grassroots mobilisation and advocacy, institutional commitment and policy support, and legislative frameworks for cooperative integration. This study contributes to the understanding of social value creation in platform cooperativism as an endeavour to co‐construct a cooperative value ecosystem, providing valuable insights for both theory and practice.

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The growing interest and prominent position of urban environments in the European policy agenda contrast sharply with the limited attention they have received in existing research regarding their role in twin transitions. This article examines whether and to what extent the expansion of the Information and Technology (ICT) sector in urban settings influences their advancement in green technology domains. Leveraging a unique dataset focused on city-level developments, we find that cities with a larger ICT sector are more likely to experience the emergence of green technologies. Moreover, our analysis reveals that examining the heterogeneity of green technologies uncovers significant policy insights. Specifically, a more dynamic ICT sector contributes to notable advancements in cutting-edge technological fields like carbon capture and storage, energy production, and transportation.

This paper explores multilevel governance (MLG) in the context of state aid programmes for the diffusion of broadband in the European Union. By comparing three EU Member States (Italy, Spain and the UK), the qualitative analysis illustrates how MLG affects both the implementation of public interventions and the reduction of regional inequalities in the access to broadband. The analysis suggests that a distributed and shared governance is potentially beneficial for the implementation of state aid programmes, but its application is constrained by idiosyncrasies in the structure of the public and private sector.

Smart city transitions are a fast-proliferating example of urban innovation processes, and generating the insight required to support their unfolding should be a key priority for innovation scholars. However, after decades of research, governance mechanisms remain among the most undertheorized and relatively overlooked dimensions of smart city transitions. To address this problem, we conduct a systematic literature review that connects the fragmented knowledge accumulated through the observation of smart city transition dynamics in 6 continents, 43 countries, and 146 cities and regions. Our empirical work is instrumental in achieving a threefold objective. First, we assemble an overarching governance framework that expands the theoretical foundations of smart city transitions from an innovation management perspective. Second, we elaborate on this framework by providing a thorough overview of documented governance practices. This overview highlights the strengths and weaknesses in the current approaches to the governance of smart city transitions, leading to evidence-based strategic recommendations. Third, we identify and address critical knowledge gaps in a future research agenda. In linking innovation theory and urban scholarship, this agenda suggests leveraging promising cross-disciplinary connections to support more intense research efforts probing the interaction patterns between institutional contexts, urban digital innovation, and urban innovation ecosystems.

Purpose Smart villages (SVs) have lately attracted considerable attention, but what does the term mean? This literature review aims to explore its ambiguous nature and to identify main theoretical and practical aspects to be further explored in the conceptualisation and implementation of these initiatives. Design/methodology/approach The analysis draws upon a review of 79 references from the grey and academic literature on SVs, identified through a systematic search of academic databases and snowball sampling. Findings This review highlights how the definition and characterisation of SVs is currently shaped by disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts. SVs are often viewed as the rural version of smart cities or an innovative model for rural development, but there has been little engagement in the literature with other debates around rurality and sustainable development. It is only through engaging with these other debates that a better understanding of the term will emerge. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to conduct a systematic review on SVs. In addition to identifying the main trends in the conceptualisations and design of these initiatives, this paper contributes to the academic debate on smart rural development and provides useful recommendations to both policy makers and practitioners.

Working within the theoretical framework set by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) literature, this paper clarifies how psychological factors (emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and information-seeking) affect skill development in the context of smart farming technologies. Interviews with multiple stakeholders from the agriculture sectors of three European countries (Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom) were used to develop a new conceptual model that attempts to generalize the complex interplay existing between skills and psychological factors in the context of smart technology adoption. This conceptualization provides a systematic view of the correlation between skills and psychological factors, complements the TAM by introducing the new concept of attitude to learning, and clarifies how the interplay between cognitive and emotional components influences the decisions to adopt and use smart technologies. In addition to these theoretical contributions, the paper emphasizes the importance of designing policy initiatives that tackle both cognitive and emotional barriers to the adoption of smart technologies, urging decision makers to move away from the simplistic assumption that increasing the digital skills of potential users automatically leads to growth in the adoption and implementation of smart technologies.

Given its central role for rural sustainable development, access to broadband and digital services has become a priority for rural communities and their elected representatives. Brexit opens up new scenarios in the policy-making of rural broadband and digital services, since the UK is no longer subject to the EU regulatory framework that has so far shaped and driven rural digitisation. This chapter explores and analyses the scenarios opened up by Brexit, with a focus on the regulation of broadband state aid, the legislation on universal service obligations, and the policy measures needed to improve mobile coverage and tackle emerging issues in digital markets. Both threats and opportunities are identified and discussed, with the chapter urging the UK government to adopt prompt and tailored policy measures supporting broadband diffusion and rural digitisation.

This study adopts a public value perspective to examine the eHealth services deployed by national and regional governments to contain the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, including symptoms checkers, information portals and contact-tracing applications. We analyse 50 cases of eHealth applications adopted in 25 European Economic Area (EEA) and outline how these systems and technologies map against four dimensions of public value: user orientation, participation, legality and equity. Our findings reveal that the public value of the eHealth applications adopted in the context of the current pandemic is affected by both endogenous and exogenous factors that undermine their ability to improve the quality of healthcare services and social wellbeing. We conclude by suggesting areas for further research to address such factors and the trade-offs emerging between different dimensions of public value.

Purpose Several sources have reported an increase in the opposition to the fifth-generation (5G) amongst local communities following the outbreak of Covid-19. In Italy, more than 300 municipalities banned 5G rollout from their territory between April and June 2020. Researchers have described this phenomenon as resulting from the infodemic caused by the pandemic, however, local protests also accompanied the rollout of the previous generation of mobile communications. This paper uses document analysis to explore the local debate on 5G municipal bans and map their evolution in an Italian region. This study aims to unravel the complexity of this phenomenon and inform future research on the actors and factors underlying the opposition of local communities towards 5G. Design/methodology/approach The analysis focusses on Marche, a region in Italy where, by July 2020, 25% of the municipalities had banned 5G rollout. This analysis is based on secondary data, retrieved from multiple online sources (articles from the local press, public statements and press releases, minutes from local council meetings and resolutions from local councils). Findings The analysis revealed that concerns on the safety of electromagnetic fields predated the pandemic, although these concerns may have increased the sensitivity of local communities towards health issues. The local debates on 5G involved many actors from the civil society, including environmentalists that had long campaigned against wireless technologies and local politicians playing a proactive role in leading and coordinating the adoption of resolutions against 5G. Originality/value This paper addresses an emerging phenomenon, such as municipal bans against 5G, that has not yet been explored in academic literature. Researchers have recently investigated the propagation of conspiracy theories on 5G on social media, but little has been said on the factors and actors shaping the debate on 5G within local communities.