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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the service constellation perspective affects innovation strategies and potentially contributes to the innovation literature, proposing a research agenda.

By analyzing the notion of a service constellation, the authors provide an overview of major implications for service innovation research and practice.

Firms and service innovation researchers need to focus on the perceived consumer value of the constellation rather than on individual services. The authors illustrate how service innovation from the constellation perspective requires coordination and synchronization between projects and different approaches to portfolio management and screening.

Adoption of the service constellation perspective creates new opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the non-essence of accounting by focusing on financial accounting’s distinct technology: financial statements. Complementing the genealogical perspective on accounting’s changing socio-historical settings, it proposes a semiotic perspective on the accounting statement.

The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach in the theoretical framing of IFRS recognition and measurement principles that underlie the statement of financial position. It mobilises Saussure and Barthes’ sign theory – semiology, as it provides a meaningful delineation of financial accounting, bringing out its distinct numerical-linguistic knowledge-construction operation.

In addition to the justification of employing semiology as a parent discipline for accounting, it is shown how IASB’s recognition and measurement procedures manifest the interrelated non-essentialist semiological principles of reciprocal articulation and value constellation. Accounting entries (“expression”) are not representations of pre-existing economic resources (“content”), but rather both are mutually constituted by delimiting the resource/asset from its broader category. Such judgment-based articulation results with value constellations, where asset value is merely a relational product of other values.

To the long-established critique that accounting has no essence, the paper adds a formulation of a non-essentialist semiotic logic: the financial statement’s semio-logic. It further sheds light on the role of such logic as an epistemological presupposition to the accounting – society reciprocity, where accounting is a malleable product of, and is used to exert power over, its social surroundings.

The purpose of this study is to explore how creative-cultural hotels can achieve sustainable service design through the development of a holistic conceptual framework.

The authors created this framework using a qualitative exploratory multi-case study of four creative-cultural hotels in Taiwan. The framework comprises strategic, organizational and interface levels to describe the design process and implementation of service offerings that co-create value within a multifaceted network of actors.

The findings of this study show that incorporating local arts and culture into sustainable service design can generate unique value and experiences for customers. From the perspective of sustainable development, these hotels seek to add value by using local creative and cultural resources to ensure that they have a sound commercial base from which to showcase their cultural features. As such, this study recommends that the hotel industry shift its focus to a paradigm that provides a strategic and sustainability-framed vision to create value for society while protecting local natural and cultural resources.

This multilevel model reframes the development of customer value constellations through a holistic understanding of user experience, eco-design practice, service encounters aligned with user touchpoints and front-line employee capabilities. To integrate the perspectives of both service providers and their customers, the proposed model embeds these stakeholders within a single model through the vehicle of local value co-creation. This holistic framework can assist in designing sustainable service within the hospitality industry to deliver better services and customer experiences. The findings provide an illustration of how the proposed multilevel sustainable-development-oriented service design framework can serve as a useful tool in guiding hotels toward corporate sustainability.

Recent discussion about relationship marketing as a new marketing concept is strongly connected with a novel perspective on exchange processes as the core of marketing. Suggestions for changes in terminology – from transactions to relationships – and the enriched understanding provide the basis for developing marketing strategies. Analyses the understanding of transactions and relationships in the context of the conceptual exchange framework developed by Bagozzi in 1975. The reflection helps to locate the distinctive foci of actual relationship marketing proponents. Further illustrates the, until now, neglected research direction of marketing relationships in complex systems or networks. As a first step to closing this gap, and to develop further the scope of relationship marketing, outlines the role of marketing in the creation and design of “value systems”.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the current understanding of organisational conditions that facilitate service design. Specifically, the focus is on organisational capabilities, interactive practices and individual abilities as units of analysis across service system levels. Grounded in design principles, the paper conceptualises and delineates illustrative service design conditions and introduces a respective service design capability-practice-ability (CPA) portfolio. In doing so, an emerging microfoundations perspective in the context of service design is advanced.

Conceptual paper.

This paper identifies and delineates a CPA that contributes to service design and ultimately customer experiences. The service design CPA consists of six illustrative constellations of service design capabilities, practices and abilities, which operate on different organisational levels. The service design CPA builds the foundation for in-depth research implications and future research opportunities.

The CPA framework suggests that if an organisation seeks to optimise service design and subsequent customer experiences, then individual- and organisational-level (cap)abilities and interactive practices should be optimised and synchronised across specific CPA constellations.

This paper provides the first microfoundations perspective for service design. It advances marketing theory through multilevel theorising around service design capabilities, practices and abilities and overcomes extant limitations of insular theorising in this context.

When comparing novel centralized and distributed communications and video streaming services, the authors identified a need for a theoretic framework to position a multitude of ICT services and technologies according to their value proposition. Literature does not integrate existing value analysis concepts into a holistic theoretical framework. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by proposing a value analysis framework for ICT services capable of describing the value exchanges between different actors and their role constellations based on technological componentizations.

The paper evaluates a representative selection of communications and video streaming services and an extensive literature study on existing value analysis research was conducted to develop the framework and to verify it.

The paper demonstrates the applicability of the value analysis framework in communications and video streaming case studies, which are technically very different from each other but, at the abstraction level the framework provides, display very similar characteristics in value flows and role constellations.

The value analysis framework could be extended and verified with other case studies and complemented with quantitative modeling and system dynamics.

The authors combine existing literature into a proposal of a holistic value analysis framework and apply it to novel centralized and distributed communications and video streaming services. Both academics and practitioners can use the framework to evaluate the value proposition of ICT services and technologies.

The paper explores the links between network structures and internationalization, conceptualized as a process of value innovation. The exploration sets off from the concept of an entry node, i.e. whether network entrance is facilitated by a direct dyadic or an indirect triadic relationship.

The paper is mainly conceptual, but also presents an empirical cross-border actor constellation which highlights the implications of the study.

Bi-directionality implies that value innovation is contingent on the fit between the actors involved in the entry node, not on the fulfilment of the needs of a focal actor. Further, the attractiveness of an entry node depends on network structures, the network positions of the actors in the entry node, the desired outcomes of entry (immersion or reach), and the actual behavior of the actors. The dynamics of transitivity can influence triadic entry nodes. However, transitivity operates differently in business networks than in social networks constituted by inter-personal ties. Therefore, closure of open triadic entry nodes is neither an automatic outcome of strong ties, nor a normatively better outcome.

The theorizing offered by this paper must be further explored in different empirical contexts to assess its practical adequacy. Still, the presented empirical case indicates that the expected attractiveness of entry nodes is closely linked to (in)transitivity.

The paper supports the relevance of expanding from a dyadic to a network perspective in order to capture the dynamics of value innovation in an international setting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.

An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.

An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.

This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how service companies can create value by developing cooperative relationships between different network actors, with particular focus on the role of the customer.

The actual analysis is preceded by a review of the principal articles on service management, with particular reference to the move from Fordist to neo‐industrial logic as well as the role of customer participation in value creation, highlighting how the role of the customer in service production has changed and how the customer can participate in creating value in a network perspective.

Effectively developing cooperative relationships in a network is linked to the key role played by the strategic centre firm. This paper highlights the role of the strategic centre firm in organizing relationships by coordinating all the actors involved.

This paper shows how each actor in the network makes an important contribution to value creation by actively participating in multiple cooperative arrangements coordinated by the strategic centre firm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore customer interactions with servicescapes and to explain in more depth the internal mechanisms that form the customer service experience.

The paper draws on an empirical study of customers using Swedish public transport systems. Data collection is based on a microethnographic approach, using think‐aloud protocols and video documentation.

The results from the empirical study contribute with a framework of three constellations of activities and interactions: namely, identifying, sense‐making, and using, which, depending on the empirical context, form two main customer process practices – navigating and ticketing. These constructs are theoretical and have implications for service research in the sense that they explain how customer experiences are formed.

While the conceptual framework is arguably applicable also to other servicescape processes and thus has the capacity to explain how a wide range of customer experiences are formed, the study is based on one industry. Consequently, it would be worthwhile to verify this framework in different service settings.

Managers should focus on making the servicescape design intuitive, meaningful and easy to use for their customers and, depending on the empirical context, support the customer processes of finding one's way and ticketing.

The study is novel by applying a microethnographic research approach in order to provide a systematic empirical analysis of how constellations of activities and interactions in servicescape processes create customer responses and thus form the customer's service experience.