In the ‘industry 4.0’ era, the phenomenon of digitalization of smart cities has gained increasing prominence, as it has the potential to address the problem of resource optimization and the pressure of demand of the growing urban population. In the past, smart city initiatives may not have created desired impacts as these initiatives were limited in scope, focusing on physical digital integration of the underlying systems of cities and of their citizens. This article examines the success factors that affect the digitalization of smart cities based on secondary research. To achieve smart cities’ core objectives of increasing quality of living, providing efficient and optimal services, thereby making the functioning of the city smart through digitalization, it is essential to look at these critical success factors, namely, sustainability, ecosystems and digital citizen. The article points out important elements such as lack of governance of sustainability, methods and processes to enhance participation of digital citizens and inadequate knowledge about structures and value creation through ecosystems that would need to be addressed while digitalizing smart cities. Given the required policy attention and focus, these factors would be expected to make smart cities sustainable, improve the quality of life of citizens and create new economic opportunities, while digitalizing them.

The growing importance of leveraging disruptive technologies is gaining prominence, while digitalizing smart cities. This paper is grounded in theory of disruptive technologies and seeks to develop and empirically test a comprehensive framework to leverage key disruptive technologies namely Internet of Things (IoT), Autonomous Vehicles (AV), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and 5G Networks (5G) for smart cities. Further, it not only identifies key disruptive technologies and the challenges while implementing them but also the benefits that the smart cities could attain by leveraging these disruptive technologies. With systematic literature review of 700 articles and using Structural Equation modelling (SEM) technique, to analyse the data collected from a sample of 575 industry practitioners and scholars, the results provide an appropriate model to leverage identified the disruptive technologies for smart cities. This article further provides implications for researchers, theories that govern smart cities and industry practitioners, while leveraging disruptive technologies of smart cities.

There has been considerable research on smart cities and on adapting technology for businesses, governments, citizens and other stakeholders. However, scant attention has been paid to determine how disruptive technologies influence smart cities. Through a systemic literature review, this paper provides a point-by-point consideration of ‘nested’ disruptive technologies, namely, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles (AV), artificial general intelligence (AGI) and 5G networks (5G), and the factors affecting their deployment in the context of smart cities. This paper also discusses why these are important disruptive technologies for smart cities and how these technologies influence them. The main challenges of implementing these disruptive technologies have been identified in the literature and are discussed in this paper. This paper also offers suggestions on the implementation of these disruptive technologies for practitioners of smart cities, so that they can consider them while digitalizing smart cities. In addition to discussing research implications, the paper also throws light on theoretical contributions and recommends ways to leverage these disruptive technologies for smart cities.