A Framework for Investigating the Adoption of Key Technologies: Presentation of the Methodology and Explorative Analysis of Emerging Practices

In this article, we present a framework for performing a systematic literature review on the implementation of emerging business practices and the adoption of these key technologies: three-dimensional printing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, computing, digital applications, geospatial technologies, immersive environments, Internet of things, open and crowd-based platforms, proximity technologies, and robotics. Through the content analysis of the full text of scientific papers, emerging practices are captured and then classified within a group of standardized labels. This allows to summarize an emerging practice as the use of a key technology within a business context—represented by industry, business function, and business process adopting the technology—with the aim of achieving improvements in terms of business performance. The adoption of this methodology allows the recognition of the opportunities for companies of enhancing performance through key technologies. With this study, the framework is tested by classifying more than 22 000 scientific articles and extracting 15 708 emerging practices. The explicative power of data collected is demonstrated by performing an explorative analysis aiming at illustrating the state-of-the-art of emerging practices. Moreover, by employing association rules algorithms, 262 practices are found as the most frequent and relevant and are the candidate for becoming future best practices.