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This paper explores how service design can contribute to the evolution of health service systems, moving them toward people-centered, integrated and technology-enabled care; the paper develops a research agenda to leverage service design research for healthcare transformation.

This conceptual study starts by analyzing healthcare challenges in terms of demographic trends and economic constraints, along with the problems of lack of people-centricity, dispersion of care and slowness in incorporating emerging technologies. Then, it examines the theoretical underpinnings of service design to develop a framework for exploring how a human-centered, transformative and service systems approach can contribute to addressing healthcare challenges, with illustrative cases of service design research in healthcare being given.

The proposed framework explores how a human-centered service design approach can leverage the potential of technology and advance healthcare systems toward people-centered care; how a transformative service design approach can go beyond explanatory research of healthcare phenomena to develop innovative solutions for healthcare change and wellbeing; and how a service systems perspective can address the complexity of healthcare systems, hence moving toward integrated care.

This paper systematizes and develops a framework for how service design can contribute to healthcare transformation. It identifies key healthcare application areas for future service design research and pathways for advancing service design in healthcare by using new interdisciplinary bridges, methodological developments and theoretical foundations.

Service design is a multidisciplinary approach that plays a key role in fostering service innovation. However, the lack of a comprehensive understanding of its multiple perspectives hampers this potential to be realized. Through an activity theory lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine core areas that inform service design, identifying shared concerns and complementary contributions.

The study involved a literature review in two stages, followed by a qualitative study based on selected focus groups. The first literature review identified core areas that contribute to service design. Based on this identification, the second literature review examined 135 references suggested by 13 world-leading researchers in this field. These references were qualitatively analyzed using the NVivo software. Results were validated and complemented by six multidisciplinary focus groups with service research centers in five countries.

Six core areas were identified and characterized as contributing to service design: service research, design, marketing, operations management, information systems and interaction design. Data analysis shows the various goals, objects, approaches and outcomes that multidisciplinary perspectives bring to service design, supporting them to enable service innovation.

This paper supports service design teams to better communicate and collaborate by providing an in-depth understanding of the multiple contributions they can integrate to create the conditions for new service.

This paper identifies and examines the core areas that inform service design, their shared concerns, complementarities and how they contribute to foster new forms of value co-creation, building a common ground to advance this approach and leverage its impact on service innovation.

Universities are proper knowledge institutions, since knowledge represents both the input and the output of their activities. Several guidelines have been issued by the European Union and national governments for the promotion of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure by universities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the amount and nature of voluntary IC disclosure in Italian universities and to gauge the opinion of university managers on IC managing and reporting.

The study applies content analysis and a survey. The content analysis was applied to a group of voluntary social reports (SRs) issued by Italian universities, while the survey was submitted to all top managers of Italian universities.

The research found a significant amount of IC disclosure in SRs. Also, university top managers demonstrated an awareness of benefits deriving from IC managing and reporting practices, both for decision-making processes and to respond to stakeholder’s needs.

The current paper contributes to IC literature by providing an assessment of IC voluntary disclosure practices in Italian universities, analysing reports other than the annual report (which is the only document media analysed by research so far). Furthermore, while previous research has focussed on IC disclosure, the current study investigates the motivations for IC managing and provides insights into the benefits deriving from IC reporting in universities.

The study aims to raise awareness of the issues to foster further debate in the area of gender (in) accounting. In the process, opportunities for future research are identified and outlined.

Literature review and a discussion of the implications lead to the identification of opportunities for future research.

Women are under-represented at senior levels in all walks of life. Where women reach senior positions, they are often paid less than men in similar positions. Countries and organisations with more gender equality do better.

Organisations and countries will be better off if they have a good representation of women at all organisational levels in all walks of life.

The authors’ perspectives of the prior literature and the identification of future research opportunities around gender (in) accounting are presented.

The aim of this work is to provide an initial picture of how some design agencies are contributing toward a paradigm shift and how they are developing in the future to better inform design policies and interdisciplinary work. There is a general agreement that the current government and public sector structure and modes of operation need radical transformation. In this scenario, a shift from New Public Management towards New Public Governance paradigm has been auspicated. Design has attracted attention as a potential approach to support this transformation, but research into Service Design, as well as discussions on its future development, for public sector innovation is limited. This paper is an exploratory study into the individual work of seven representative UK design agencies operating for and within the public sector.

The paper reviews literature on public sector reform and innovation to inform comparative studies of contemporary design agencies working for public sector reform. Interviews with seven designers from NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Participle, Innovation Unit, Uscreates, Collaborative Change, Futuregov and Snook are conducted to review their perceived role for public sector reform, their design approaches, exemplar projects and main challenges.

Emerging design strategies for Public Sector reform are: a collaborative design approach that considers all stakeholders as equal co-creators of public value; operating at different complementary levels to aim at systemic change; designing from the inside out (innovation culture) and outside in (market change). These different strategies imply the development of possible different business models. Existing creative tensions appear between embedding and outsourcing strategies, acting as facilitators vs designers, developing both designing and service delivery roles.

This paper is based on a limited sample of design agencies, and it is not a systematic study into the impact of their design work, which should be the object of a following study.

This paper brings Service Design practice into public sector innovation debate to inform future interdisciplinary research and innovation policies. It positions existing design innovation strategies within the wider picture of public sector reform to support a more informed design practice.

Few studies have looked at the UK design agencies for public sector innovation and discussed their possible future developments. This paper provides an original and holistic description of design for public sector innovation with considerations on how it should be interpreted when developing supporting innovation and design policies.

The current research aims to investigate what Italian state universities consider as intellectual capital (IC) in their performance plans. Universities assume a specific responsibility in the production and dissemination of knowledge and in the investment in research and human resources; consequently, a central role has been given to IC approaches in managing universities. Drawing from this, in 2009 Italy required state universities to issue a performance plan with a section devoted to IC.

A content analysis was conducted to discover the type and extent of IC strategies in a group of 44 contemporary Italian state university performance plans issued in 2011.

The findings show a variable focus on IC items, with a particular emphasis on aspects related to the development of relationships with external partners, supporting the idea that nowadays the university sector is strongly investing in the development of relational capital to achieve its third mission.

In assessing practices of IC planning in Italian state universities, the current study highlights the path of development that will be undertaken by the Italian university system in the near future. This path allows us to evaluate the strategic position that the Italian university system will cover in the European higher education arena.

The paper makes an original contribution to research on IC strategies in universities, given the lack of empirical studies on such issues. It represents one of the first attempts to analyse IC in Italian state universities’ planning processes.

Research dealing with non-financial reporting formats in public sector organizations is progressively expanding. This paper systematizes the existing literature with the aim of understanding how research is developing and identifying the gaps in need of further investigation.

A structured literature review was conducted by rigorously following the steps defined in previous studies. The structured nature of the literature review paves the way for a solid understanding and critical analysis of the state of the art of research on non-financial reporting formats in public sector organizations.

The critical analysis of the literature shows that most existing studies have focused on sustainability reporting in higher education institutions, local governments and state-owned enterprises, while remaining silent on the healthcare sector. Additional theoretical and empirical approaches should feed future research. Several areas deserve further investigations that might impactfully affect public sector organizations, standard setters, practitioners and scholars.

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the literature on different reporting formats that public sector organizations adopt to report various dimensions of their performance to both internal and external stakeholders. The structured literature review enables the identification of future directions for the literature in this field.

Using the quality evaluation approach, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the contribution of intellectual capital (IC) to the development of the third mission in Italian universities, defining the impact of these activities in the regional context. This research aims to verify if the mandatory reporting on quality discloses the contribution of IC to value creation, enhancing the universities’ awareness about IC management and third mission development.

The convergence between IC framework and quality evaluation approach is tested through an empirical research on a sample of 71 Italian universities funded by the government. Statistical analyses use data collected for the period 2004-2014 during the national assessment for research activity and third mission performance. The impact of third mission on the university ecosystem is verified using the indexes related to the territorial development rates.

This research found significant IC disclosure in the quality evaluation model and it highlights the possible integration between the IC measures and the quality evaluation indicators. The research findings show also a positive impact of third mission activities in the university ecosystem and the relevant role of structural capital and relational capital in the development of third mission. These findings encourage a collegial discussion in the university governance and among academics, stimulating a strategic behavior in the whole system

The paper focuses the attention on research activity and third mission, considering the final results provided by an external stakeholder of university. Further research must include the role of teaching activity and the opinion of universities’ managers, researchers and administrative staff.

Following the neo-institutional sociology perspective, this research analyses for the first time the convergence between the solid experience of quality assessment and the immature IC culture in Italian universities. This analysis explores the value created by intangible activities in the university ecosystem, with a longitudinal perspective, contributing to the fourth stage of the IC literature.

This study aims to understand and explain how institutional change occurs at the level of value co-creation practices in service ecosystems. Despite the centrality of collective practices to the service ecosystems perspective, theoretically grounded explanations of how practices change and become institutionalized remain underdeveloped. Applying the theory of routine dynamics, this paper addresses two questions as follows: what does the institutional change mean at the level of value co-creation practices and what processes underlie these changes?

The study develops a conceptual framework that characterizes value co-creation practices as routines involving three aspects, namely, ostensive, performative and artifactual. As a key element in institutional change, the interplay between these informs an account of institutional change processes in service ecosystems.

The proposed conceptual framework specifies the conditions for institutional change in terms of value co-creation routines. First, any such change is seen to be grounded in alignment between changing institutional rules and the ostensive, performative and artifactual aspects of routines. Second, this alignment is seen to emerge through a dialectics of planned and practice-based activities during institutional change. An empirical research agenda is proposed for the analysis of institutional change processes in different service ecosystems.

This conceptual framework extends existing accounts of how service ecosystems change through the contributions of multiple actors at the level of value co-creation practices.