# Clustering Smart City Services: Perceptions, Expectations, Responses
## 5 Discussion and Conclusions
As a critical interpretation of these key findings or our research, given the limitations, we have to comment on the following:1. Our finding supports somehow, or it is an indication that the argumentation provided by [PERSON] [19], that \"Driven by the profit motive of global high-technology companies, in collusion with the trend towards city governance being wedded to a competitive form of 'urban entrepreneurialism', has left little room for ordinary people to participate in the smart city\". A critical number of responders in our study highlighted their concerns and their limited motivation to be parts of smart cities services mostly concerned about privacy, security and trust of ICT-enabled platforms. Based on propositions of [PERSON] that a key response to the weak performance of the dominant normative bias of ICT's experts and industry partners related to the effectiveness of smart city services, a radical shift in smart cities research concerns considering smartness from different perspectives emanating from small-scale and fledgling examples of participatory and citizen-based types of smart initiatives. This is a bold finding that needs to be interpreted by Industry players and Industrial partners in Smart Cities Services Domain. 2. In close relation to the ideas and opinions expressed by [PERSON] [20] in \"No one likes a city that's too smart\", it is extremely interesting to realize that the responders of our survey ranked in the top priorities services that keep technology in the \"background\" and leave the space for creativity, peer matching, dialogue, research collaboration, skills, and competencies building. For example smart cities services like the ones highlighted in our study \"News and insights smart systems related to City Life (perceptions about quality of life, opinions and ideas for prosperity and response to critical social problems)\", \"Open educational spaces (integration of Massive Open Online Courses in a simple access point\", \"A global smart urban network connecting research institutions all over the world for the promotion of a humanistic vision\", \"A wide area network with distributed scientific committees and ongoing open source projects\", \"The utilization of the smart city infrastructure for the enhancement of youth entrepreneurship or startups networks\" show that the smart cities research moves to a new level of maturity where advanced technologies provided by Industry matter only if they facilitate real human needs related to social networking for value-adding purposes. 3. A third significant finding and interpretation for the industry is the reality that most of the users of smart cities services seem to don't care for the sophistication of smart cities infrastructures and services. In a way, they consider technology as a \"black box\" where the complexity of computing approach does not matter for real users. This is a direct indication that sets design guidelines to Industry providers of smart cities services that the \"human\" factor matters more than the technology component. 4. An indirect interpretation of our study is also that Industry leaders and providers should adopt user perceptions analysis and studies in a wider context, depth, and breath. Our study was only a pilot study in which the generalization of findings needs to be done considering the social context of our research. Nevertheless, though some key findings provide significant insights that the future of smart cities research needs at least four critical components: 1. Openness in the meaning of open participatory communities 2. A balanced approach in terms of the social and technology components 3. Trust, in terms of transparency of services, data protection, and privacy and authentication 4. Integration, in the sense of complete, end-to-end user/citizen experiences
5. A direction for combined industrial and academic research must be in the same line with this pilot research.