Technology Adoption in Smart City Initiatives: Starting Points and Influence Factors

The concept of smart city is considered as a new paradigm of urban development. Information and communication technologies are expected to transform cities into smart cities and improve the citizens' quality of life. However, smart city initiatives still have difficulties to leverage value from technology opportunities. How smart city initiatives start to examine the possibilities of new technologies for smart services is therefore a highly interesting question. Based on a multiple case study we describe two different approaches and identify factors that were crucial for the course of action. As a result, we found on the one hand smart city initiatives that consider the involvement of citizens as essential and start technology adoption from a need perspective. On the other hand, we found initiatives that see new technology and standardized data exchange as a unique opportunity and therefore start with a systematic build-up of technology and data platforms. Innovation adoption research is used as a theoretical basis.