Volume 11 (2019): Issue 4 (December 2019)
Special Issue: Smart European Village

The paper deals with the role of ICT and the related infrastructures to induce innovations for sustainable rural development. In particular, it focuses on the innovations induced by ICT in farms and in new rural firms, and on how digital infrastructures support and generate social innovation mechanisms, leading to the consolidation of entrepreneurship and dissemination of ICT-based innovation in rural areas. The hypothesis is that the presence of digital infrastructures generates a double effect: overcoming the concept of geographical proximity (relevant for remote rural areas) and promoting social innovation. In particular, this paper examines the role of social innovation to create a new demand for products, services and organisational models for farms and rural enterprises, promoting further innovation. To target the objectives, the work analyses three case studies of new business models (BMs) based on ICT innovation. The analysis focuses on the most important interactions, learning and organisational processes within the new enterprises and among the new farms/enterprises and the other economic and institutional actors, and on how they were shaped and changed by the use of ICT, relating them to a conceptual model. These three cases, although pioneering, are important since they give an original response to some of the main problems and needs of remote and inner rural areas, as for the access to high value segment of food market, the information deliveries about attractiveness of landscape and countryside for foreigners, investors and tourists and the creation of new stable relation with consumers/citizens in the urban areas. The three cases have been analysed with the aim to identify how the ICT, and the related innovations, create an interconnection between four characteristic elements of the BMs (value creation, supply chain, customer interfaces, financial model) and the restructuring of proximity dimensions (cognitive, institutional, social, geographical, organizational). The work shows how these three cases have several communalities, but also different aspects with respect to our objective of analysis: there are different ways in which the four characteristic elements of the BM are constructed and also different in the role that the different dimensions of proximity play in structuring the innovation process in each one of them. More generally, the results of the work also lead to consider a new role for public investments in ICT infrastructures: public administrations should intervene in order to create a coherence within projects of public and private initiatives.

Traditional and emerging interest networks supported by the advancement of digital and telecommunication technologies, the growing use of bioenergy and the ability to take advantage of knowledge beneficial for local populations and business development promote strategic breakthroughs of rural communities. The paper focuses on the problem of the smart village development with respect to a sustainable rural regional development. The aim of the research is to identify the preconditions for rural area progress and smart rural villages driving forces in Lithuania. The research object concerns the principles and driving forces of the development of smart villages. The research methods inter alia included analysis, systematization, and comparison of scientific literature, documents, and good practice examples. Analysis of the experiences of villages and local/international organizations and research into the best practices helped to identify the drivers and the key principles of the smart village development. The case study revealed that three out of five selected pilot rural areas of Lithuania have an innovative potential with some of the smart village principles adopted. The main constraints identified by the study were related to the lack of technological, digital or energy efficiency innovation and human resources in rural areas.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) open up new possibilities for development in rural and mountain areas. ICTs are analysed as a factor attracting business and enabling a dispersion of economic activity that is usually concentrated in metropolitan areas. Rural and mountain areas have benefited from the increasing incorporation of ICT in companies because development strategies are now made viable, thus bringing local territories into global markets and vice versa. Competitiveness and the added value of local development companies are incorporated into the product through the value given to local identity factors. Other competitive localisation factors of these zones are lower localisation costs and spatial loyalty among companies in the cluster. On the other hand, there may be an a priori shortage of available skilled workers in these particular areas but this deficit could be balanced out by the small size of companies established in these zones. This paper describes several case studies of specific companies in the Catalan Pyrenees where parts of the productive process with the highest added value—like design, organisation, etc—are carried out, while manufacturing occurs in other countries. It also analyses activities and services offered by smart farms and in smart rural areas. ICTs are important for the educational and informative levels of the population and also for the establishment of new companies and services in rural and mountain areas.

Coastal regions are generally conceived as highly advanced in terms of socioeconomic and innovative development. Acting as international contact zones, coastal agglomerations are described as gateways for absorbing new knowledge, technologies, business cultures, etc. Yet, this perception is based on studies of large coastal cities and agglomerations. In our study, we focus on coastalization effects manifested in rural settlements and evaluate the innovation capability of the economies of coastal rural areas. The research scope covers 13 municipalities of the Leningrad region, including 134 rural settlements. The research methodology is structured into three main blocks: the evaluation of the human capital, assessment of the favorability of the entrepreneurial environment, and analysis of susceptibility of local economies to innovations. The list of analyzed innovation dynamics parameters includes the geospatial data for the distribution of population, companies and individual entrepreneurs, localization of specialized support and innovation infrastructure, sectoral analysis of the economic structure, digitalization aspects, et cetera. The data coverage period is 2010–2019 with variations depending on the availability of individual indicators. The research findings reveal particular features of the countryside as compared to urban settlements. Strong asymmetries are observed between the development of rural settlements cross-influenced by coastalization, near-metropolitan location, and national border proximity.

The challenges of reaching rural areas with the latest digital technologies are well documented, resulting in a longstanding urban–rural digital divide in many countries. In 2016, Scotland embarked on one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Europe when it committed to bringing superfast broadband to all of its citizens by 2021. In this paper, we take stock of recent progress towards this goal by applying the framework of the “Sparsely Populated Area”. While previous work has highlighted that Scotland’s digital divide is shrinking, application of this new framework reveals inequalities that traditional urban–rural classifications mask. We show that, while the number of digital “not spots” has fallen in recent years, many of those remaining are concentrated in a region that faces particular vulnerabilities in terms of service delivery and population decline. Digital inequalities introduce a further challenge to this region in addressing its potential as a viable and attractive place to live and work.

The basis for SMART VILLAGE development is a high-quality infrastructure for civilian equipment and services, including the coverage of rural villages by high-speed Internet. The aim of the article is to evaluate the support and impacts of these activities through the Czech Rural Development Program in the period 2007–2013 and, according to the ex-post evaluation, to further identify policy-implications. The results of the analysis show a clear positive impact of the support of the service infrastructure on the development of supported municipalities, on the contrary, the results of supporting the connection of the rural population to the Internet are patchy.

The paper examines the SME’s in the Czech Republic from the perspective what makes them to adopt telework using the data from the research made in 2017. The research includes 1018 SME’ s. The purpose of the study was to try to find out alignment between telework and some organizational constraints. We hypothesized that employer adoption of telework would depend on the size of the firm, the duration of telework adoption, foreign owner, IT level, and on the implementation of project management. Our empirical evidence showed that telework correlated with the foreign owner participation and the duration of the adoption of telework, with the IT level and with the adoption of project management. It does not correlate with the size of the enterprise and the duration of the adoption of telework.

In the context of demographically ageing communities across rural Europe Smart Villages have considerable potential to promote ageing healthy. Whilst in principle supporting healthy ageing in the context of the Smart Village might appear a relatively straightforward endeavour, in operational terms, successful development of smart, 21^st century villages relies upon, and sometimes assumes, an appropriate interplay of socio-technological factors. Articulated through a lens provided by the digital ecosystem model advocated by the European Network for Rural Development (2018), this paper offers some observations from the field. We acknowledge the challenges faced by remote rural places in their journey to become ‘smart places’ and identify formal and informal interventions that could better position rural communities to become part of a wider, smart society.

Smart villages have been increasingly heralded as a development strategy for the European countryside but with no clear understanding as to what comprises a smart village. Frequently, commentators associate smartness with quality of IT infrastructure and the ability to use it. An alternative perspective argues that the smartness can be better understood as a phenomenon associated with self-organised, bottom-up community action that either addresses the weaknesses of both state and market to contribute to local people’s wellbeing or exploits emergent opportunities through collective means. Using Scotland as an example, policy architectures can now be seen to be explicitly designed to support bottom-up community action. This paper explores this alternative notion of smartness based on communities’ capacities to self-organise and deliver a range of developments that support wellbeing and resilience and explores some of the challenges arising from this approach.

The paper is aimed at an attempt to define a smart village in the Czech conditions. It argues that the principles of smart villages are very similar to the concept of sustainability. The analysis deals with preventing rural exclusion, promoting digital technologies for the management of the rural infrastructure, teleworking in rural areas and using ICT for participation and governance. This approach is documented in the case of the South-Moravian Region. It was concluded that it was not so much coverage or accessibility of digital technology that was the main barrier of more intensive use of the smart village concept but rather the lower qualification level and conservatism of rural population is. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to increasing the digital literacy of rural people.

Mobilising knowledges across a geography creates opportunities for transitions to smart systems. Publics in a geography are consequently able to form their perspectives around a system and align potential benefits with their needs. Intelligent transport systems are an example of smart living and EVs are cited as an alternative technology that are key to their application. This conceptual paper uses EVs as an example to demonstrate how knowledge mobilisation relating to such technologies can better cater to a geography’s needs. Unfortunately, current EV studies focus on a rural-urban binary. Thus, this conceptual contribution reflects on a study in Cornwall, UK, to reveal the heterogeneous influences on rural EV-related perspectives. This heterogeneity manifests both in particular locations and across cases. Overall a suite of transferrable participatory methods to improve rural knowledge mobilisation is outlined.