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“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.

This paper aims to prove the following hypothesis Problem Statement: HYPOTHESIS (1) User Experience collection of mobile applications can be done using the Crowdsourcing mechanism; (2) User Experience collection of mobile applications are influenced by the mindset of Crowdmembers, culture/ethnicity/social background, ease of interface use and rewards, among other factors.

The authors of this paper, did a literature review first to find if Crowdsourcing was applicable and a used method to solve problems in Software Engineering. This helped us to narrow down the application of Crowdsourcing to the Requirements Engineering-Usability (User Experience) collection. User experience collection of two Malayalam language-based mobile applications, AarogyaSetu and BevQ was done as the next step. Incorporating findings from Study I, another study using AarogyaSetu and Manglish was launched as Study II. The results from both cases were consolidated and analyzed. Significant concerns relating to expectations of Crowd members with User Experience collection were unraveled and the purpose of Study was accomplished.

(1) Crowdsourcing is and can be used in Software Engineering activities. (2) Crowd members have expectations (motivating factors) of User Interface and other elements that enable them to be an effective contributor. (3) An individual’s environment and mindset (character) are influential in him becoming a contributor in Crowdsourcing. (4) Culture and social practices of a region strongly affects the crowd-participating decision of an individual.

This is purely self-done work. The value of this research work is two-fold. Crowdsourcing is endorsed significant in Software Engineering tasks, especially in User Experience collection of mobile applications. Two, the Crowd service requesters can be careful about designing the questionnaire for Crowdsourcing. They have to be aware and prepared to meet the expectations of the Crowd. This can ensure the active participation of potential contributors. Future researchers can use the results of this work to base their research on similar purposes.

Previous research on salesperson-customer proximity has yielded mixed results, with some studies documenting positive proximity effects on shopping responses and others demonstrating the reverse. To reconcile such mixed findings, this paper aims to test whether and how salesperson proximity influences a series of key customer outcomes in actual retail settings using sample sizes that are considerably larger than most former investigations.

We conducted two high-powered field studies (N = 1,312) to test whether salesperson‐customer proximity influences consumers’ purchase behavior and store loyalty. Moreover, we investigated whether the short-term effects on purchase behavior were moderated by the extent to which the consumption context had a clear connection to consumers’ own bodies.

Salesperson proximity increased purchase incidence and spending in consumption contexts with a bodily basis (e.g. clothes, beauty, health), suggesting that consumers “buy their way out” in these contexts when a salesperson is violating their personal space. If anything, such proximity had a negative impact on consumers’ purchase behavior in contexts that lacked a clear bodily connection (e.g. building materials, furniture, books). Moreover, the link between proximity and consumer responses was mediated by discomfort, such that a salesperson standing close-by (vs farther away) increased discomfort, with negative downstream effects on shopping responses. Importantly, the authors found opposite proximity effects on short-term metrics (purchase incidence and spending) and long-term outcomes (store loyalty).

Drawing on the nonverbal communication literature and theories on processing fluency, the current work introduces a theoretically relevant boundary condition for the effects of salesperson-customer proximity on consumers’ purchase behavior. Specifically, the bodily basis of the consumption context is discussed as a novel moderator, which may help to explain the mixed findings in this stream of research.

Salesperson-customer proximity may serve as a strategic sales tactic to improve short-term revenue in settings that are closely tied to consumers’ own bodies and characterized by one-time purchases. However, as salesperson proximity was found to be associated with lower store loyalty, irrespective of whether the shopping setting had a bodily basis, the risk of violating consumers’ personal space may have costly consequences from a long-term perspective.

The present field studies make three central contributions. First, we introduce a novel moderator for proximity effects in various sales and service settings. Second, we test the focal hypotheses with much higher statistical power than most existing proximity studies. Finally, we document that salesperson-customer proximity ironically yields opposite results on short-term metrics and long-term outcomes, thus underscoring the importance of not solely focusing on sales effectiveness when training frontline employees.

This study examines the impact of customer involvement (CI), technology strategy, firm internationalization and servitization on product and service innovation performance (SIP) in hybrid offerings. In addition, it investigates the moderating role of digitization and co-creation in the relationship mentioned above.

A research framework was developed through the lens of service-dominant (S-D) logic theory, and the proposed research hypotheses were empirically tested. Primary data were collected via the survey method, and structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Findings of this study suggest that the S-D logic theory effectively explains CI and servitization in hybrid offerings. Furthermore, digitization is a crucial driver of SIP. Additionally, this paper finds that co-creation moderates between servitization and innovation performance of hybrid offerings.

Besides theoretical contributions, this study presents valuable insights to manage service networks during servitization.

First, this work proposes a comprehensive framework of hybrid offerings' driving factors (i.e. CI, firm internationalization, technology strategy and servitization) and their impact on product and SIP. Second, it tests the moderating effects of digitalization and co-creation in the context of hybrid offerings.

This paper aims to discuss the suitability of topic modeling as a review method, identifies and compares the machine learning (ML) research trends in five primary business organization verticals.

This study presents a review framework of published research about adopting ML techniques in a business organization context. It identifies research trends and issues using topic modeling through the Latent Dirichlet allocation technique in conjunction with other text analysis techniques in five primary business verticals – human resources (HR), marketing, operations, strategy and finance.

The results identify that the ML adoption is maximum in the marketing domain and minimum in the HR domain. The operations domain witnesses the application of ML to the maximum number of distinct research areas. The results also help to identify the potential areas of ML applications in future.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by finding trends of ML applications in the business domain through the review of published research. Although there is a growth of research publications in ML in the business domain, literature review papers are scarce. Therefore, the endeavor of this study is to do a thorough review of the current status of ML applications in business by analyzing research articles published in the past ten years in various journals.

The aim of the present study is to examine the impact of human resource (HR) practices (human resource empowerment, organizational culture and transformational leadership) on innovation activities as well as the effect of innovation activities on perceived financial performance within sport services firms.

The proposed relationships were examined using empirical data from 172 managers of Greek sport services firms. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) analysis was used to investigate the role of human resource management (HRM) practices on innovation activities and whether innovation activities affected the perceived financial performance.

The results of the study indicated that HRM practices, such as human resource empowerment, organizational culture and transformational leadership, significantly impact innovation activities and subsequently innovation activities have a significant and positive effect on perceived financial performance as measured by satisfaction levels in relation to specific key performance indicators (KPIs) such as profit, ROI, sales volume and market share.

This study presents useful theoretical and managerial implications that can be used by sport service firms to assess the effects of HRM practices on innovation activities and perceived financial performance.

This study contributes to the literature on several merits. Firstly, the authors jointly estimate the impact of HRM practices on innovation and its concurrent effect on perceived financial performance, which is not methodologically considered before. Secondly, the authors incorporate a more thorough measure of perceived financial performance including four dimensions of performance, and finally the authors analyze a larger sample of sport services firms relative to previous studies, leading into more concrete conclusion on the research hypotheses.

This study first aims to survey the state of user innovation in Iran and then identified barriers and incentives for user innovation in Iran.

In this study, a questionnaire (through 1,360 adults from Iran) prepared by De Jong (2016) was used to survey user innovation.

The results showed: the percentage of user innovators is high in Iran, there is no linear relationship between the income of a country and the percentage of the user innovators, there is a positive relationship between the education level and the percentage of user innovators in Iran, there is no linear relationship between the number of people educated in the scientific and technical fields and the percentage of user innovators. Finally, based on surveying users opinion in questionnaire, four incentives and five barriers in user innovation were identified that can help policymakers to improve their innovation policies.

Literature review in this field showed it was found that in a number of developed countries, the issue of user innovation has been addressed, but in Iran as a developing country, no such research has been conducted so far. In addition, it was found that so far, no comprehensive research has identified barriers and incentives for user innovation, so this study, first surveyed the state of user innovation in Iran and then identified barriers and incentives for user innovation in Iran.

Service innovation (SI) is crucial for social and economic development. However, most of the studies about innovation relate to product/manufacturing. Aimed at enhancing the academic debate about SI, this paper intends to (1) assess the factors applied in empirical studies about SI from 2006 to 2020, (2) evaluate if researchers differentiate innovation in services from innovation in manufacturing, (3) evaluate if researchers differentiate innovation among distinct service segments within the heterogeneous service industry and (4) propose a categorization model for the factors that influence SI.

Our study employs a five-step approach for a systematic literature review of 99 relevant empirical papers from 2006 to 2020.

Our findings demonstrate a persistent lack of conceptual consolidation in the area, adding value to the ongoing dispute between opposite views on current SI's maturity level. Our results also evidence the non-observance of differentiation of innovation factors between service and manufacturing empirical papers. In addition, our paper shows an even higher lack of differentiation in the use of innovation factors among different service segments.

This paper provides the first more systematic verification of the lack of service differentiation within the empirical innovation study field. In addition, despite the abundance of factors that influence SI, the proposed categorization model offers the possibility to promote an area's conceptual consolidation. Our findings and categorization also support the debate about pathways for the field's development and help researchers in their future study designs and analyses.

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.

This study aims to develop an empathetic and user-centric customer support service design model. Though service design has been a critical research focus for several decades, few studies focus on customer support services. As customer support gains importance as a source of competitive advantage in the present era, this paper aims to contribute to industry and academia by exploring the service design model.

The study adopted a theories-in-use approach to elucidate mental models based on the industry’s best practices. In-depth interviews with 62 professionals led to critical insights into customer service design development, supported by service-dominant logic and theory of mind principles.

The ensuing insights led to a model that connects the antecedents and outcomes of empathetic and user-centric customer service design. The precursors include people, processes and technology, while the results are user experience, service trust and service advocacy. The model also emphasises the significance of the user’s journey and the user service review in the overall service design.

The model developed through this study addresses the critical gap concerning the lack of service design research in customer support services. The key insights from this study contribute to the ongoing research endeavours towards transitioning customer support services from an operational unit to a strategic value-creating function. Future scholars may investigate the applicability of the empathetic user service design across cultures and industries. The new model must be customised using real-time data and analytics across user journey stages.

The empathetic and user-centric design can elevate the customer service function as a significant contributor to the overall customer experience, loyalty and positive word of mouth. Practitioners can adopt the new model to provide superior customer service experiences. This original research was developed through crucial insights from interviews with senior industry professionals.

This research is the original work developed through the key insights from the interview with senior industry professionals.