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As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a burning question for the countries is whether and how COVID-19 will change what and how we do as a country? Therefore, most of the countries in the world have to radically digitalize their operations (Parker & Grote, 2022; Singh, Rawat, & Singhla, 2021). The development and introduction of Innovative e-government reforms has been a creative tool for bringing creativeness, competency, strength and transparency in the country (Carter, Yoon, & Liu, 2022; Hochstetter, Vásquez, Diéguez, Bustamante, & Arango-López, 2023; Singh et al., 2021; Snead & Wright, 2014; Zhang, Jiang, Adeel, & Yaseen, 2018). Scholars and practitioners have been sharing a strong interest in understating factors that contribute to adoption of innovative e-government services - intentions to use digitalized government services (Aggelidis & Chatzoglou, 2009; Maatuk, Elberkawi, Aljawarneh, Rashaideh, & Alharbi, 2022). Based on technology acceptance model (TAM), for several decades, researchers have believed that perceived usefulness explain a large portion of the variance in adoption of innovative e-government services (Carter et al., 2022; Horst, Kuttschreuter, & Gutteling, 2007; Sang, Lee, & Lee, 2009; Warkentin, Gefen, Pavlou, & Rose, 2002). When citizens perceive usefulness, they are motivated to use innovative e-government services (Rehman, Kamal, & Esichaikul, 2016). Thus, perceived usefulness is thought to affect intentions to adopt innovative e-government services by affecting citizens’ attitude, convenience, and cost perception of the government services (Rana, Dwivedi, Williams, & Weerakkody, 2015).
However, the empirical evidence linking perceived usefulness to intentions to adopt innovative e-government services is equivocal (Abu-Shanab, 2017; Agarwal & Prasad, 1998; Davis, 1989; Maatuk et al., 2022). Some studies have identified that perceived usefulness is positively related to innovative e-government adoption (Abu-Shanab, 2017; MacLean & Titah, 2022; Rana et al., 2015), whereas others have shown a weak or even non-significant relationship (Agarwal & Prasad, 1998; Davis, 1989; Gilbert, Balestrini, & Littleboy, 2004). Additionally, yet, after all of these years, innovative e-government outcomes are being questioned by researchers, despite having all useful technical features, most innovative e-government projects fail (Anthopoulos, Reddick, Giannakidou, & Mavridis, 2015) due to citizens’ lack of interest to adopt (Carter et al., 2022; Janssen, van Veenstra, & Van Der Voort, 2013). In light of low success rate and conflicting findings (Anthopoulos et al., 2015), scholars need to explore the new theoretical perspectives and empirical investigations to deepen knowledge of the effects of innovative e-government service features on citizens’ adoption of innovative e-government services (Rana et al., 2015; Sá, Rocha, & Cota, 2015).