Value creation in the context of ‘smart cities’: the key role of the users as co-producers of e-health services

Purpose – Organising cities around local communities has become one of the most challenging aspects of today’s globalised world, where creating value for citizens is among the priorities of urban governance. In effect, the opportunity to generate forms of value for inhabitants is one of the issues debated on the table by urban policy makers and this has probably been inspirational for the European ‘smart cities’ project. With this paper, we aim to engage in a reflection on the concept of ‘E-health care’ by analysing it from the point of view of its value. What is the meaning acquired by the concept of value in this context? And what does it mean for modern urban contexts to generate value for their citizens? The idea behind the paper is to explore the relevance that social production has acquired in the construction of value in capitalist societies. Seen from this viewpoint, means of value creation that rest upon social relationships have been discussed by a variety of authors (Arvidsson, 2010; Zwick et alii, 2008; Terranova, 2000) that emphasize different sides of the phenomenon. Processes of socialization have been defined as a structural aspect of contemporary production processes (Lazzarato, 1997) with empirical studies developed mostly in the context of the digital economy and industry (Terranova, 2000). As argued in the marketing literature (Prahalad et al. 2004; Lusch and Vargo,2006) creating value responds more and more to logics of co-creation (Prahalad et al. 2004) between producers and consumers, where the latter are in a way swallowed within production processes (Zwick et alii, 2008). Whether this empowers the consumers and the ideological facets behind that are not matters that will be touched in this paper; instead the main concern now is to understand, how ‘Smart healthcare solutions’ can create value for the ‘smart city’ thanks to the active role of its users. E-health programs have been, in fact, experimented in order to improve the quality of the care and patient outcomes (Blaya et al, 2010). Indeed, in this article, we will turn our attention, in particular, on smart health care programs, usually included within the ‘smart living’ category. In the paper, the focus will be on smart health care solutions and in particular on those services that highly rely on the users to be delivered and to generate value.