*4.2.3.4 Environmental impacts*

Forecasting is the reduction of human impacts and carbon emissions, and the improvement of animal welfare preannounces a positive affection regarding the environmental aspect. No risks were explicitly discussed by the experts.

#### *4.2.4 Taking final stock of the digital innovation impacts*

The majority of effects related to social and economic dimensions are dominating the scene. Considering the managerial sphere, the replacement of manual activities with automatic ones can allow business owners to improve productivity by better managing their processes and lowering labor costs. Moreover, large business owners can also benefit from the economies of scale facilitated by technological infrastructures. Conversely, the trend of small businesses is the opposite since they risk being ruled out by a market in which they cannot compete or be incorporated by larger companies. Consequently, a negative impact can affect communities, which can suffer from these phenomena with the closing of local businesses and unemployment. So, a disparity between small and big players, accompanied by the risk of inequitable development, can rise highly [193–194]. From the socio-cultural side, positive expected impacts affect rural communities with an increase in inclusion, driven mainly by connectivity, and greater well-being thanks to more free time and less heavy work. In this sense, a smart community, manages innovative technologies and infrastructures, enabling the evolution of relational dynamics that go from the individual to the entire community. The harmonious use of ICTs causes an increase in social capital (ranking, followers, how, etc.), which can be easily measurable [195]. It can certainly be said that the Smart Community, in fact, favors new models of territorial development, which, starting from the citizen and his needs, exploit digital technologies, thus stimulating collective digital creativity, from the definition of planning processes to the sharing of information. Strictly related to this concept, a need for a new inner area's community emerges, which means a capillary network of places and people (smart village, smart cultural heritage, smart communities, slow tourism, agricultural wellness, etc.) that favors the unified management of these territories even during the health emergency [196]. The use of ICTs technologies such as platforms and infrastructure, as well as social media, mainly linked to leisure and tourist, and sporting activities, can represent an opportunity for new forms of development. That is why smart tourism and smart living can be engines for the development of these areas. Smart tourism is therefore intended as a new technological frontier for the services sector and a container of innovative technologies for tourist use. It embodies the cultural and economic revolution of living in all facets, even the immaterial structure of cities and management methods. It can be conceived as the result of traditional tourism's recent evolution in which technological innovations and consumer orientations dialog according to new logic'from dreaming to sharing'. The result is a new tourism model resulting from web and social networks and improving its efficiency [197, 198].

Within this scenario, technologies can represent an opportunity to reactivate and innovate the old local production systems [199] of agriculture, food, and craft. It can empower sustainable tourism (cultural, religious, naturalistic) as a lever for development through the promotion of internal areas in increasingly complex circuits and schedules. ICT can also allow the reorganization of work in territories, especially in the tertiary sector, by introducing the formula of remote working in its declinations of teleworking and smart working.

#### **4.3 What are the barriers to digitalization process of these territories?**

Ferrari et al. [192] have also detected the barriers to the digital processing of these territories. In that sense, also barriers have been analyzed with a multi-dimensional

## *Digital Innovation and Sustainable Development: Two Sides of the Same Coin DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112294*

approach. That's why the authors have deemed socio-cultural, technical, economic, and institutional barriers. Many obstacles are linked to the social tissue of these zones, which are lagging in a state of isolation. It is a fact that the population is old, with a low density, and sparsely populated because of the presence of seasonal works. This state of demography certainly means brain drain [200], fear of changes, roots to traditions, and lack of competencies. Besides, the implementation of the internet has technical issues too. Deeply explaining, rural territories must develop connectivity since they lack infrastructure. Moreover, they have to keep pace with current connections by developing an easily accessible digital connection. On the other side, economic barriers refer to the shortage of financial resources to be invested in technological solutions. It is a fact that technology implementation has costs related to ICTs, the modernization of the physical infrastructure of farms, and the development of digital skills.
