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1. Introduction
The wide diffusion and the evolution of digital technologies have profoundly changed all aspects of our lives and have had an incredible impact on countless economic sectors, tourism above all. The idea of ascribing “intelligence” to the modern technologies has, recently, led to the emergence of the concept of “smartness.” Although different disciplines provide many definitions that recall the term “smart,” in practice a smart environment can be loosely thought to be one in which a widespread use of information and communication technologies (ICTs )allows all stakeholders to easily access knowledge and information thus facilitating innovation of their activities and providing value to their users or customers (see, e.g. Kearns and Lederer, 2003; Zhou and Li, 2012).
In the past few years, these concepts have been applied to tourism destinations, and the term “smart tourism destination” has been coined (Boes et al., 2016; Buhalis and Amaranggana, 2014; Del Chiappa and Baggio, 2015; Wang et al., 2013). A growing number of academic studies have been attempting to analyze, also empirically, the technological and business foundations of this concept. What appears to be quite evident is that it is actually very difficult to find or imagine a tourism destination that can be considered totally smart. Further, the most part of existing studies seems to suggest, at least implicitly, that wide and pervasive use of technology alone might make it possible to consider the destination as being “smart.” Hence, it seems crucial to deal with the smart-driven approach in destination management and marketing by devoting relevant attention to everything that needs to be planned and implemented (e.g. a profound revision of organizations, processes and practices, a change in the organizational culture, etc.) to render this fascinating technology-driven business model real and effective.
Moving from these considerations, this study examines the ideas and the concepts that inform smart tourism development and management and performs an analysis of recent literature highlighting the gaps and the logical inconsistencies that still exist in current literature around the concept; to this end a content analysis has been used. Then, a network analytic approach is applied to three Italian tourism destinations: Elba Island in the Tuscany Region, Gallura in the region of Sardinia and Livigno in the Italian Alps. The...