Factors of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) adoption in the context of Smart City development

Abstract

The objective of the current research is to identify the factors that determine the citizens’ decision to adopt Smart City services that are ICT-enabled and also statistically test the influence of those factors on the frequency of Smart City services use. The factors that can potentially influence the acceptance of Smart City services use were derived from the Technology Acceptance Model 3 and the Diffusion Theory. The explanatory factor analysis was applied to identify the clusters of the acceptance determinants and evaluate their influence. The results show that all the determinants of Smart City services use represent factors “Quality of the service”, “Perceptions of users and society”, “Trust in the technology provider”. The most influential components of the extracted factors are output quality, comparability with needs, result demonstrability, anxiety and risks associated with the technology. The correlation analysis showed the strongest significant positive relationship between the frequency of Smart City services use and the “Quality of the service” factor. The study of companies that provide Smart City services carried out to support the findings about citizens revealed that the customers and businesses perception on the ICT-enables services adoption are different what can be the reason for the low adoption rate of Smart City services in Russia. Ultimately, the comparative analysis of the international studies on the ICT-enabled services adoption shows that factors are individual for each Smart City domain and do not associate with the cultural peculiarities.