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1. Introduction
Economies and societies have always been subject to change. Yet change has never been so intense and come at such a high speed as in recent years (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014). Current global forces influencing the world have never been more complex and challenging and are causing disruptive changes in all aspects of society. To be prosperous in this changing world, it is critical to comprehend how to adapt to these global forces and use them to gain competitive advantage. One way to address societal challenges is the use of cutting-edge technologies (Townsend, 2013). Especially within tourism, technologically driven innovations have had a large impact on the development of the industry (Hjalager, 2010). Recent ICT developments, initiating smartness and smart places have been recognised to cause a paradigm shift within the tourism industry (Buhalis, 2015).
The notion of smartness finds its origin in the 90s, although it proliferated significantly after 2008 (Hollands, 2008, 2015). Initially, the concept was coined as a complex technological infrastructure, embedded within urban areas to foster economic, social and environmental prosperity (IBM, 2014; Meijer and Bolívar, 2015). More specifically, it posited the integration of ICT to improve processes and interconnect sub-systems (Townsend, 2013), to ultimately tackle the economic, social and environmental challenges imposed by urbanism (Caragliu et al. , 2011). This implication of cutting-edge technology triggered concepts such as the smart planet (IBM, 2015), smart city (Hollands, 2008) and more recently, the smart tourism destination (Buhalis and Amaranggana, 2014). Recognising the potential of smartness and understanding the need to adapt to this rapid change in technology, governments as well as public and private agencies started to incorporate smartness in new policies and strategies to enhance sustainable development and economic growth (Nam and Pardo, 2011; Cocchia, 2014; Meijer and Bolívar, 2015).
A common aspect in smart places is the reintroduction of the socio-technical paradigm, emphasising the connection between society and technology (Orlikowski, 1992). People and technology are connected and perceived as equal actors (Latour, 2005; Meijer and Bolívar, 2015) collaboratively creating economic, social and environmental prosperity for all (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). While cutting-edge technologies provide the infostructure for the development of a digital ecosystem in smart places (Gretzel et al. , 2015), it is the interconnectivity of heterogeneous...