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New service businesses carry opportunities for industrial companies. The different cost management and management control implications of those service businesses deserve attention, which is a widely under-researched area in management accounting and control literature. Digital twins could hold potential in unveiling and supporting those new service business opportunities, as a unique approach of this paper. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility and potential for creating a digital twin of a service, especially to unveil the management accounting and control implications of the digital twin in developing new service businesses.

This paper investigates the potential of a digital twin in unveiling cost and control implications of new service businesses by examining the characteristics of a digital twin in the service business development context. The paper use an in-depth interventionist case study, where the designed animations illustrate the possibilities of a digital twin of a service. The animations showing the service process characteristics were first used as a communication tool and eventually those animations were actively used in customer cases for different purposes. This motivated the idea for examining the implications of such animations representing a digital twin of a service.

The paper provides empirical insights regarding the potential for developing and using a digital twin of a service for different cost management and management control purposes. The digital twin of a service may include all main details of a new service offering, simulating the functionality of a service, hence making the performance and the implications of the new service concept clear for all the stakeholders. The digital twin of the service enables defining the processes, setting targets and helps communication about the value generation. Thus, they represent a significant toolkit for the management accounting and control function of the manufacturers.

This paper is among the first attempts to understand the digital twin of the service. The paper is unique in providing financial and control implications of digital twins also in the context of service business development. The in-depth interventionist approach enabled an exceptional exploration process on the subject. The article paves the way toward further research on managing the digital twins of services in the future.

This paper aims to examine how customer participation in new service development (NSD) and customer relationship management (CRM) technology can improve the NSD performance of manufacturing firms. Additionally, the paper examines CRM technology usage to understand how it impacts new service performance both individually and jointly with customer participation in NSD.

This study is a survey of 216 manufacturing managers who are overseeing the development of new services at their organizations. For the analysis, structural equation modeling is used with Amos 22.0. Measures of all latent variables in the analysis pass the traditional tests for reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity. Furthermore, the results of a common latent factor test for common method variance and Harman’s one-factor test indicate that common method bias is not a source of endogeneity in the model.

Customer participation has a positive effect on NSD performance. CRM technology usage also has a positive effect on NSD performance. The effect of customer participation on NSD performance is enhanced by CRM technology. The results of a post hoc analysis suggest that the usage of CRM technology has the most benefit for managing the technical aspects of customer participation.

This study has methodological limitations that may impact the generalizability of results. For instance, it is based on cross-sectional self-reported survey data, which is more subjective than longitudinal secondary data. Survey research lacks the depth and nuance of qualitative research designs, which are commonly employed to study NSD. In addition, this study focuses on large US manufacturing firms. The authors do not include small firms or international organizations in the sample. Despite these limitations, they believe the findings can provide significant contributions to the NSD literature.

Although prior research has shown that customer participation and CRM technology can individually influence new product development (NPD) performance, the results indicate they are equally effective factors in the development of new services. Furthermore, the authors show that customer participation can be enhanced via the use of CRM technologies. The interaction is more pronounced within the technical aspects of NSD.

This study contributes to the NSD literature, and it also has implications for managers leading NSD efforts in traditional tangible-product industries. The findings provide additional evidence that customer participation is an effective NSD strategy for manufacturing firms (Morgan et al., 2019). Furthermore, CRM technology is integral to NSD performance. CRM technology not only has a direct effect on NSD performance, but the interaction term of customer participation by CRM technology also has a positive effect on NSD performance.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the influence of the knowledge base (KB) of the company on driving forces of innovation processes in knowledge-intensive services (KIS) and to compare the level of innovativeness of the final services.

The paper investigates through qualitative research 11 KIS organisations with different KB.

The research results identified and described the influence of the KB on driving forces of innovations processes and its results in companies with four newly identified KBs (analytical, synthetic, symbolic and compliance).

Further research, based on a larger number of companies, is needed to confirm the results of this research and to complement the effect of the KB on driving forces of innovation.

This research can help organisations understand how to develop strategic plans and new ideas for innovative services depending on the KB of the organisation.

The description of successful innovation processes and results in several leading companies presented in the study may help other companies in identifying knowledge-integration practices to improve performance and innovation processes that support multiplicity, productivity and creativity.

The study systemised the sources of new ideas for innovation in companies with different KB, several driving forces of innovation were identified and how these forces are affected by each KB; lastly, innovation results were compared in companies with different KB.

This study aims to explore how not-for-profit organisations (NFPs) adopt service innovation and improve their employee resilience capabilities as a response to environmental changes arising from marketisation of public services.

Using a multiple case-study research design, this study involved 32 interviews with frontline employees working in a not-for-profit care-providing organisation.

This study finds that the development of absorptive capacity can facilitate service innovation adoption in NFPs and improve employee resilience in times of transition.

This study offers theoretical insights on service innovation, absorptive capacity and employee resilience in NFPs. It makes practical recommendations that will enable NFPs to help frontline employees better adopt service innovation practices in business models endorsed by the private sector.

This study aims to simultaneously examine customer complaints through the proposed novel Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) model which incorporates of creating the new insurance services to win customers' hearts and mind for the insurance industry.

A novel DFSS research methodology which includes the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), Pugh concept selection, creative product analysis matrix and importance–satisfaction model (I–S Model) was proposed. In addition, a real insurance company case was studied to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed DFSS model.

The results of a novel DFSS model not only can establish new services, but also can dramatically reduce the cost of resolving customer complaints.

The findings of this study are useful for insurance companies and other related service providers in devising tailored strategies to offer quality and suitable services to their customers.

This study addresses the paucity of research and marketing gaps through the proposed novel DFSS model for the first time in the insurance industry. These study findings would enable researchers and practitioners to formulate strategies for solving customer complaints effectively and develop new services from time to time.

“The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on service innovation during the past two decades and provide an analysis of sources of publication, citations and authorship using bibliometric analysis techniques (VOSviewer).” This paper aims to assesses the important trends, enhance the academic debate, identify research gaps and propose future directions and a research agenda.

This paper examines 176 articles in English language published from 2002 to 2022 from the Scopus database by adopting the bibliometric technique using VOSviewer software. This paper analyzes the different levels and boundaries of service innovation using bibliometric analysis of “service innovation research” using VOSviewer software. The methodology analyzes the number of citations, co-citations, keywords, authors, journals and countries.

The review of the past 20 years indicates a substantial growth in the number of good research publications on service innovation. The UK, the USA, Sweden and Australia dominate this research area with the most articles published to date under the subject area of “Business management.” The review highlighted that most of the studies on service innovation focused on products, companies and processes in the services industry. The most critical factors behind service innovation failure are improper management and lack of knowledge. The citation analysis revealed various research implications and directions for the future.

This study focuses only on service innovation and excludes research on performance management and control. Thus, future studies may explore this area of research in future studies. Only research articles were analyzed; conference papers, reports, manuals and white papers from practice were excluded. Research implications indicate that future studies on service innovation would be essential for organizational excellence, not process excellence.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and essential trends of research on service innovation. This study identifies the research gaps and provides a clear research agenda for understanding the various elements of service innovation.

In the new digital age, enterprises are facing an increasing global competition. In this paper, we first examine how Information Technology (IT) can play an important role in giving significant competitive advantage in the modern enterprises. The business value of IT is examined, as well as the limitations and the trade-offs that its applicability faces. Next, we present the basic principles for a successful IT strategy, considering the development of a long-term IT renovation plan, the strategic alignment of IT with the business strategy, and the adoption of an integrated, distributed, and interoperable IT platform. Finally, we examine how a highly functional and efficient IT organization can be developed.

Our methodological approach was based to the answers of the following questions: 1. Does IT still matter? 2. What is the business value created by IT along with the corresponding limitations and trade-offs? 3. How could a successful IT Strategy be build up? 4. How could an effective? T planning aligned with the business strategy be build up? 5. How could a homogenized and distributed corporate IT platform be developed? and finally, 6. How could a high-performance IT-enabled enterprise be build up?

The enterprises in order to succeed in the new digital area need to: 1. synchronize their IT strategy with their business strategy, 2. formulate a long-term IT strategy, 3. adopt IT systems and solutions that are implemented with elasticity, interoperability, distribution, and service-orientation. 4. keep a strategic direction towards the creation of an exceptional organization based on IT.

This paper is original with respect to the integrated approach the overall problem is examined. There is a prototype combined investigation of all perspectives for an effective enforcement of IT in a way that causes acceleration in competitive advantage when conducting business.

This study aims to use organizational fashion to underscore a novel phenomenon in which products, services and practices fade in and out of the tourism/hospitality setting within a specific time frame. Drawing from the fashion theoretical strands in organization research, this paper studies how fashion has been conceptualized, operationalized and then diffused among tourism/hospitality enterprises.

A qualitative case design was used. A total of 37 semistructured in-depth interviews with executives of innovative tourism/hospitality companies (e.g. restaurants, hotels, theme parks and travel agencies) were conducted. This paper focuses on the organizational fashion phenomenon in which organizational trendsetters with creative, “hot” products/services have emerged prominently in the marketplace.

This inquiry illustrates a social phenomenon concerning the organizational fashion setting process by integrating existing production practices among different organizational suppliers in the hospitality sector. Different cases in the study show that fashion consists of a series of hybrid, paradoxical processes. These include conceptualization (conventionalization vs novelty, and personalization vs conformity), operationalization (bundling vs unbundling, and learning vs relearning) and diffusion (framing vs co-framing, and adaptation vs alteration).

Throughout the three continuous processes, service design and identity development for consumption, as well as value creation and knowledge transformation for production, are carried out according to the decision of what is “hot” and what is “out” at a particular time. In essence, fashion helps to explain why hospitality institutions imitate specific innovations to take advantage of popular trends in the consumer market, as well as how such trends vanish eventually.

This research contributes the insight that organizations use fashion as a managerial initiative to translate their organizational goals and improvise nascent products and services. The fashion processes can be triggered by microlevel individual organizations and are spread through a series of social interactions to become macrolevel phenomena in a recurring manner.

This paper aims to derive a model that explores how the interplay between knowledge integration capability and innovation impacts strategic orientation, leading to the attainment of sustainable competitive advantage. The study considers the constituents of strategic orientation, namely, customer orientation, competitor orientation and technology orientation, as the basis for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. The study suggests that the firm’s capacity for integrating external and internal knowledge shapes how strategic orientation influences sustainable competitive advantage through service innovation.

This empirical research relies on qualitative and quantitative data gathered from telecom professionals to assess how knowledge integration and service innovation influence sustained competitive advantage. Structured equation modeling is used to examine the model and its interrelationships.

The research establishes significant relationships between strategic orientations, knowledge integration capability, service innovation and sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge integration capability and service innovation are found to mediate the relationship between strategic orientations and the achievement of sustainable competitive advantage.

The study highlights the significant contribution of a firm’s knowledge integration capability in driving service innovation, especially in technology-intensive service industries facing hypercompetition. It also advocates prioritizing technology orientation and integrating knowledge from internal and external sources for competitive advantage.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to model the effect of knowledge integration capability and service innovation on strategic orientation-led sustainable competitive advantage.

Technological innovations provide huge opportunities to expand and revolutionize the scope of products and services offered. This is particularly true for tourism, which is undergoing significant changes due to the development of new technologies. The level of technology diffusion depends on several factors like the exchange of information among peers, and the attitude and shared perception among the contributors. The aim of the study is to explore the diffusion of technology in tourism with a specific focus on the social media discourse around new technologies. Thus, the paper investigates the level of interest in these new technologies analysing the information exchange occurring between individuals on Twitter in order to explore the influence of reciprocal networking.

To capture the attitudes expressed in the industry, the study analyses the ongoing discourse on Twitter as a proxy for the participants “interest in new technologies. Through a social network analysis of the tweets and retweets conducted over a period of nine months, the research maps the level of information exchange about the diffusion of new technologies. Moreover, the sentiment analysis provides an interesting overview of the individuals” attitudes towards the awareness or the adoption of new technologies.

Our analysis has provided several insights: (1) the information network on blockchain in tourism consists of participants who change very quickly over time (high turnover of accounts); (2) some contributors have an extremely important role in influencing the flow of information in the system (information centralization), they can have a generalist (discussing several topics) or a specialist (focusing on a specific topic) behaviour and this strategic choice influences their network's structure; (3) these central nodes also have an impact on the definition of positive and negative sentiment towards a topic (sentiment influencer).

The paper contributes to the literature on technology diffusion, by focusing on one of the preconditions of diffusion that is the shared positive attitude towards technological innovation. More specifically, we adopt a network-based approach, which is useful to explain the level of information exchange and the public discourse that can impact the shared perception and attitude towards technological innovation. The study also highlights the role of knowledge brokers in influencing this public discourse. Future studies can deepen the association between positive perception, higher levels of information exchange and increasing usage of specific technologies. Our results also suggest further exploring the opportunity to combine social media data and other sources of information to shed more light on the technological innovation diffusion processes.

This paper shows how practitioners can benefit from the analysis of information exchange about new technologies in tourism adopting a network perspective with the aim of understanding the level of influence among contributors. Moreover, the increasing interest in blockchain technology and the potential combination between social media data and other sources of information can offer promising insights.

The present study explores the level of technology diffusion through the analysis of information exchange on social media (Twitter). Furthermore, the dynamics of individual user behaviour offers a better understanding about media effects.

While previous research is focused on the users' perception towards the development of new technologies in tourism, the aim of this study is to investigate the dynamics behind the level of diffusion of information and awareness about these new technologies, which still represents an unexplored area of research.