Exploring the Successful Paths of Smart Communities Development: A QCA Study

Since a community is a basic subunit of a city, smart community involved those important affairs which most directly related to the unban services in a smart city overall planning. Although many smart community projects have been launched in both developed and developing countries in last several years, the theoretical exploration and the empirical analysis for practice paths of smart communities remain insufficient. Prior related literatures have provided us the discussion about different development paths of smart city from two aspects: information architectures and business models. Based on those two perspectives, we proposed a theoretical framework which regards a path of smart community development as a strategies set including both information architecture factors and business model patterns. For exploring the successful paths based on the proposed framework, we select 69 communities from Beijing, China, which have done a series of smart community practices, as our samples, deal with the case materi...