Purpose Smart villages (SVs) have lately attracted considerable attention, but what does the term mean? This literature review aims to explore its ambiguous nature and to identify main theoretical and practical aspects to be further explored in the conceptualisation and implementation of these initiatives. Design/methodology/approach The analysis draws upon a review of 79 references from the grey and academic literature on SVs, identified through a systematic search of academic databases and snowball sampling. Findings This review highlights how the definition and characterisation of SVs is currently shaped by disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts. SVs are often viewed as the rural version of smart cities or an innovative model for rural development, but there has been little engagement in the literature with other debates around rurality and sustainable development. It is only through engaging with these other debates that a better understanding of the term will emerge. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to conduct a systematic review on SVs. In addition to identifying the main trends in the conceptualisations and design of these initiatives, this paper contributes to the academic debate on smart rural development and provides useful recommendations to both policy makers and practitioners.

Given that the creation of successful interactions and collaboration networks develops into sustainable and successful social entrepreneurial organisations, learning communities can serve as an ideal environment to train students in social entrepreneurship. This paper describes massive open online learning communities as an appropriate methodology for the distance teaching of social entrepreneurship and how the students on a massive online open course in social entrepreneurship commit to the learning community generated in this virtual environment. Data from a pioneer social entrepreneurship massive open online learning communities were analysed using three statistical methodologies. The analysis demonstrates that a student's commitment to the distance learning community is directly related to his degree of participation, the rewards received, his correspondence with the other students and recognition from the other members of the community.

Resumen La consideración del valor social en las transacciones con

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EU broadband policy has been described as an example of multi-level governance (MLG) involving manifold actors across different sectors and levels of government. Whereas the extant literature has largely explored the interaction among public and private players and between national and supranational regulators in the context of the EU broadband markets, little attention has been paid to the MLG of state aid for broadband diffusion. This paper aims to fill such a research gap by employing multiple qualitative methods to explore how MLG has affected the implementation of public initiatives in support of broadband diffusion across Spain, Italy and the UK. The crosscountry comparison reveals a trend towards the centralisation of public interventions, which created efficiencies in the management of state aid but raised tensions with local authorities. Therefore, the current MLG of state aid needs to be adjusted to balance the benefits of a greater coordination with the need urgency to ensure the effective and active participation of local stakeholders to the implementation of broadband projects.