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The COVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to consider how to reach vulnerable communities with extended outreach services to improve vaccination uptake. The authors created an optimization model to align with decision-makers' objective to maximize immunization coverage within constrained budgets and deploy resources considering empirical data and endogenous demand.

A mixed integer program (MIP) determines the location of outreach sites and the resource deployment across health centers and outreach sites. The authors validated the model and evaluated the approach in consultation with UNICEF using a case study from The Gambia.

Results in The Gambia showed that by opening new outreach sites and optimizing resource allocation and scheduling, the Ministry of Health could increase immunization coverage from 91.0 to 97.1% under the same budget. Case study solutions informed managerial insights to drive gains in vaccine coverage even without the application of sophisticated tools.

The research extended resource constrained LMIC vaccine distribution modeling literature in two ways: first, endogenous calculation of demand as a function of distance to health facility location enabled the effective design of the vaccine network around convenience to the community and second, the model's resource bundle concept more accurately and flexibly represented complex requirements and costs for specific resources, which facilitated buy-in from stakeholders responsible for managing health budgets. The paper also demonstrated how to leverage empirical research and spatial analysis of publicly available demographic and geographic data to effectively represent important contextual factors.

Marx’s monetary theory is an important part of Marxist economics and an irreplaceable milestone in the intellectual history of the monetary theory. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main content of Marx’s monetary theory from three aspects: the source and nature of money, the function of money and the historical significance of money.

Moreover, this paper also gives an extended understanding of Marx’s monetary theory from four perspectives: the endogenous credit mechanism of money, the functions of money and demands for money, the financial function of money and the economic and social functions of money.

Lastly, the present paper discusses the practical significance of Marx’s monetary theory from three perspectives, namely, the inspection of “Bitcoin” from the nature and function of money, the definition of demands and the division of supplies at the monetary level, and the prevention of systemic financial risks and the focus of financial supervision.

Marx’s monetary theory is an important part of Marxist economics and an irreplaceable milestone in the intellectual history of the monetary theory. However, for a long time, the contribution of Marx has rarely been mentioned in the intellectual history of monetary theory. Even the book, Political Economy (On Capitalism), has been only summarily concerned with the source and function of money in Marx’s monetary theory, rather than revealing Marx’s outstanding contribution in the monetary theory and the financial connotation of Marx’s monetary theory, and expounding its practical significance.

This study aims to develop an educational tourism demand model, particularly in respect to dynamic effects, university quality (QU) and competitor countries. Educational tourism has been identified as a new tourism sub-sector with high potential, and is thus expected to boost economic growth and sustainability.

This study reviews the literature on the determinants of educational tourism demand. Even though the existing literature is intensively discussed, mostly focusing on the educational tourism demand from an individual consumer's perspective, this study makes an innovation in line with the aggregate demand view. The study uses data that consist of the enrolment of international students from 47 home countries who studied in Malaysia from 2008 to 2017. The study utilised the dynamic panel method of analysis.

This study affirms that income per capita, educational tourism price, price of competitor countries and quality of universities based on accredited programmes and world university ranking are the determinants of educational tourism demand in both the short and the long term. Also, a dynamic effect exists in educational tourism demand.

The results imply that government should take the quality of services for existing students, price decisions and QU into account to promote the country as a tertiary education hub and achieve sustainable development.

Research on the determinants of the demand for educational tourism is rare in terms of macro data, and this study includes the roles of QU, competitor countries and dynamic effects.

There is no proposed solution to address the unresolved issues of constructing the Chinese university intellectual property information service system (IPISS) to promote the whole process service efficiency of IP creation, utilization, protection and management. The purpose of this paper is to propose a complete system, including theoretical framework and system development which addresses the existing difficulties to IP create, protect and transfer for researchers in universities. The paper shares the practice of utilizing the system developed by Wuhan University IP research team known as Wuhan University Intellectual Property Information Service System (WHU-IPISS).

First, the IPISS of 23 universities in China was investigated on the internet. Aiming at the deficiencies of the system, such as single service type, lack of patent display window, low management efficiency. This paper constructs the theoretical framework, proposes the IP ecological chain model, divides it into four sub-chains and carries on the functional design. Further, under the theoretical framework, the IPISS was developed, including the resource supply management system, user demand matching system, resource assessment system and expert support system. Finally, the system was applied to Wuhan University to provide IP services in the whole process for university researchers.

WHU-IPISS realizes the functions of IP resource supply, demand matching, value evaluation and expert support. It solves the IP needs of university researchers and provides a guarantee for their technology research, patent portfolio, patent transfer and patent rights protection. It also improves the efficiency of IP service and can construct the IP ecosphere in universities.

The WHU-IPISS solution resolves issues of “How to develop the university IP whole process service model, fulfilling the IP service needs for universities' researchers”. The software will be released as open-source for other universities' use. The publishing model is also useful for those universities that intend to implement the IPISS.

This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice.

This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative marketing perspective and model, which could contribute to reforming marketing.

An analysis of the current understanding of marketing showed that the discipline’s myopic focus on activities, which disregards what marketing is as a phenomenon, is the primary reason for the prevailing problems and failure to reform marketing. Based on research into service logic (SL), the paper demonstrates that a higher level view of service can be characterized as the provision of help to the users of goods and services to ensure that these goods and services deliver meaningful assistance in their lives and work. This suggests that the ultimate objective for marketing is to make firms meaningful to the users of their goods and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, since this paper is the first to conceptually develop a perspective on marketing and a corresponding model informed by service scholarship, more conceptual and empirical research is necessary. Developing the new meaningfulness-based perspective and model for marketing brings a new approach to the process of resolving marketing’s current troubled situation.

The meaningfulness approach to marketing enables customer-centered marketing strategies to be implemented. Such strategies include both demand-stimulating and demand-satisfying programs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to examine marketing’s troubled situation from a service research and SL perspective.

Quantifying the performance level of surgeons with digital virtual reality (VR) simulators can help ensure that quality requirements in healthcare are met. In order to better understand integration amongst quality principles, practices and technologies in the adoption and diffusion of VR simulators, the authors applied a technological innovation system (TIS) framework. The purpose of this study is to understand how the adoption and diffusion of VR surgical simulators in a Swedish healthcare context is influenced by various system factors.

In this study, single-case holistic design based on innovation system theory was used to analyse the adoption of digital quality technologies related to surgical performance in Swedish hospitals. The case employs a mixed methods approach triangulating data longitudinally from published documents and expert interviews.

Adoption of digital technologies regarding surgical performance is restricted by system factors relating to inconsistent normative and regulatory requirements for quantified performance criteria to judge surgical expertise. Addressing these systems' weaknesses with evidence-based training programmes can have a significant impact on the further development of the innovation system and can ultimately affect healthcare reliability and quality.

This paper explores quality management (QM) challenges in the context of digital transformation in healthcare. The paper attempts to fill the gap for TIS studies in a healthcare context and highlight the role of innovation function strength along the value chain and in relation to technology cycles to increase the understanding of adoption of digital technologies relating to surgical performance.