What is Smart for Retailing?

TLDR

Smart city research has focused on technology, yet retailing has been overlooked despite its rapid adoption of advanced systems that raise new questions about smartness beyond mere tech, including organizational dimensions. This study seeks to define smart retailing by outlining its technological features and the challenges of adopting such smart technologies.

Abstract

While the last decade has seen increasing interest in the smart city phenomenon from both scholars and practitioners, little attention has been paid to what extent retailing might be considered as part of smart cities, with benefits for all the actors involved in the process. In fact, retailing is subject to a radical innovation force that makes available several technologies that can be successfully applied. The extensive use of advanced systems gives rise to new questions concerning the smart use of technologies. Moreover, the application of advanced technologies is part of a trend towards the creation of smart cities for a better urban society. In this scenario, the idea of smartness goes beyond the concept of application of new technologies by also including more important dimensions, such as organizational structure. Hence, our work aims at identifying what can be considered smart for retailing, in terms of features of smart technology for retailing, and the challenges emerging from the adoption of such smart technologies.