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Technology is revolutionizing the management logic of service systems. The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, is challenging interaction between humans and machines changing the service systems’ value co-creation configurations and logic. To envision possible future scenarios, this paper aims to reflect upon how the humans’ use of AI technology can impact value co-creation.

The study is developed, at a conceptual level, using selected elements from managerial and marketing theoretical frameworks interested in value co-creation – Service-Dominant Logic, Service Science and Viable Systems Approach (VSA) – used as interpretative tools to reframe value co-creation in the digital age.

The interpretative approach adopted and, in particular, the new VSA notion of Intelligence Augmentation (IA), in the perspective of the information variety model, shed new light on value co-creation in the digital age framing a possible “IA effect” that can empower value co-creation in complex decision-making contexts.

The study provides insights useful in the design and management of service systems suggesting a rethinking of the view of AI as a means for mainly increasing the smartness of service systems and a new focus on the enhancement of the human resources contribution to make the service systems wiser.

The paper provides a refocused interpretative view of the interaction between humans and AI that looks at a possible positive impact of the use of AI on humans in terms of augmented decision-making capabilities in conditions of complexity.

Poverty, hunger, inequalities, diseases, unsustainable use of resources, etc., in spite of scientific progress, still remains unsolved worldwide issues. All these issues relate to the challenges of sustainability and sustainable development that now call for urgent answers. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the service research community can respond to this call and to identify key areas of potential contribution.

After a brief review of selected service literature aimed at exploring its interest in the topics of sustainability and sustainable development, the authors develop the interpretative proposal identifying the key requirements of a global engagement in the challenge of sustainability and sustainable development and highlighting the potential contribution of service research.

Findings highlight the potential contribution of service research to the global challenge of sustainability and suggest acting upon education by considering the “T-Shaped” professional model as a possible reference for embedding sustainability in the education of future managers and addressing the need of interdisciplinary thinking through the systems approach.

The proposed study of service literature is only an exploratory analysis of main contributions that does not aim to identify gaps but only to highlight the potential of a greater engagement of service research in the global call for a more sustainable and inclusive development.

A trans-disciplinary approach is also required. This implies the involvement of the business and the social real world.

This paper represents a novel call for engaging the service research community in a boundary-crossing collaboration with the aim of contributing to address the challenge of sustainability.

This paper aims to focus on distributed technologies with the aim of highlighting their economic-organizational dimensions. In particular, the contribution first presents a deeper understanding of the nature and the dynamics of the economies and diseconomies that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies. Second, it aims to shed light on the increasing tension between the hierarchy-based model of production and peer-to-peer (p2p) production, which involves the pervasive diffusion of distributed technologies.

Adopting an economic-organizational perspective, which is deeply rooted in the related extant literature, an analytically consistent model is developed to simultaneously take into account the following variables: adoption density independent variable) and economies of knowledge integration and organizational diseconomies (the costs of a loss of control and the costs of organizational decoupling and recoupling) as dependent variables.

Distributed technologies allow access to a large quantity and a wide variety of cognitive slacks that have not been possible until now. In doing so, they are leading the transition towards p2p. This is an emerging production paradigm that is characterized – with respect to mass production – by a shift in the relative importance of cognitive slack in comparison with tangible slack. Nevertheless, the unrestrainable diffusion of distributed technologies is not neutral for organizations. On the one hand, these technologies allow for the integration of economies of knowledge, and on the other hand, they involve organizational diseconomies that should not be ignored by managers and researchers.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by developing a consistent analytical framework that simultaneously takes into account the economies of knowledge integration and potential organizational diseconomies (the costs of coordination and the loss of control) that arise from the adoption and diffusion of distributed technologies.

Sustainability is increasingly at the forefront of the public debate in Europe and the world. However, despite this increased interest, research seems to have partially ignored the importance of its social dimension and the issues related to social equity, people care, protection and personal development at all stages of society and, consequently, of business. Accordingly, this paper aims at investigating the “soft” dimensions of sustainability, integrating its mainstream “technical storyline” with a “human/social storyline”.

In this paper a taxonomy of the main key drivers of the soft dimension of sustainability is proposed and tested on a sample of Italian companies. Through interviews with their managers, actions and needs in terms of sustainability soft drivers are identified.

The achieved results demonstrated that the case companies differently integrated the soft dimensions of sustainability within their companies. All the sample companies are aware of the role of social sustainability. According to the proposed taxonomy, the systemic drivers of soft sustainability are the main shared ones.

The paper provides new insights into the essence of the organizational soft dimensions and their centrality in the overall achievement of sustainability for companies. It also offers managerial insights into how to effectively manage these dimensions and policy implications about the need for clearer consideration.

Rooting in the literature on training and laying on Kirkpatrick model, this paper aims to explore key drivers of corporate training to identify how they can be combined into an integrated framework of learning for human capital development.

By adopting the constructivist grounded theory, this contribution analyzes the experience carried out in the last ten years by Virvelle, an Italian corporate training firm.

Results show the rise of five core categories, g1iving rise to an integrated model of Kirkpatrick. Their dynamic interplay led to a new orientation of Kirkpatrick model giving rise to a metalearning ecosystem.

Managerial implications have identified key factors on which building and implementing appropriate corporate training programmes capable of triggering co-generative processes of value creation. Particularly, the essential role of learning quality culture, digital technology and personalization are detected in integrating not only hard but furthermore soft shades of learning. Concerning theoretical implications, the emergence of key structural and systems enabling dimensions for learning, and contextual mechanisms involved in reshaping training effectiveness and achieving integrated learning outcomes are detected. The main limitation of this study lies in the need to generalize results: the conceptualized framework needs to be empirically tested.

The value of this research is built along three main points. The first is the integration among the core categories that an integrated learning system can be built on, promoting learning quality culture through positive feedback loops. The second is represented by the chance to enhance an integrated mutual knowledge development among engaged actors, thereby shaping a more holistic and multidimensional learning model. The third is related to the transversal role that digital technology plays in all phases of the training process as it integrates and enriches them.

Given the growing attention on service ecosystem and the role played by technology and institutions in shaping of actors’ relations and interactions, the purpose of this paper is to examine a tourism environment with the lens of service ecosystem in order to derive a deeper understanding on the underlying mechanisms.

A mixed methodology was used. First, literature review based on service ecosystems framework was conducted to critically analyze the roles of technology and institutions to shape a tourism service ecosystem. Then a case study was conducted.

Two main findings are described: the role and the characteristics of physical and virtual engagement touchpoints in the emergence of a tourism service ecosystems; and the relationship between technology and institutions in the resource integration. In particular, the authors conclude that institutions can shape the usage of technology which, in turn, can enable and imply the emergence of new institutions, continually adjusting the system of the tourism service ecosystem.

The analysis contributes to deepening the knowledge about value co-creation processes and engagement expedients in tourism destination, explaining the role of institutions and technology in helping actors to integrate resources and exchange services. The study can also be useful for practitioners in search for powerful tool to increase the competitiveness of a tourism destination.

The study is one of the first attempts to conceptualize and operationalize a tourism destination in a service ecosystem framework. In this way it contribute to enhance scientific knowledge in a tourism management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on financial reporting quality (FRQ) within family firms (FFs), assessing whether longevity can determine a different propensity to earning management (EM) behaviors.

The sample, composed by Italian and Brazilian listed family (and non-family) firms, is segregated into old and young. For each subsample, unsigned discretionary accruals are calculated, using two different EM models. A linear regression model is then proposed, together with some robustness tests, to confirm the research hypothesis.

The outcome is that, within FFs, the entrenchment effect seems to be diminishing with the company’s age, up to become lower than the alignment effect. With some caveat, research also demonstrates that old FFs are more propense to supply higher FRQ than any other subsample group.

The authors demonstrated that, in terms of EM decision process, FFs become virtuous just with time. More research is needed to evaluate the impact of the share and management control separately and to analyze different generation segmentation.

This paper could help non-family stakeholders, as it shows that different company types (family vs non-family), at a different stage of the life-cycle (young vs old) have a different attitude toward FRQ. On the other hand, family owners could exploit the longevity as a value driver.

This paper suggests that agency theory and socio-emotional theory are complementary in explaining the family control role in earnings management decisions. The study also contributes to the debate of FF homogeneity and on risk behavior in FFs, often portrayed as having a patient capital.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon strategic marketing in emerging economies (EEs). It tries to answer the research question: what new business models are enabled by the Viable Systems Approach (VSA) and Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) perspectives?

The paper is developed by integrating two well-established perspectives – VSA and SDL – and applying them to inclusive businesses.

The integration of these perspectives allows the authors to recognize a convergence toward business models that seem to be consistent with the principles of inclusive capitalism. The authors claim that by shifting between a reductionist/static and a holistic/dynamic view, these perspectives can be integrated, thus revealing an interesting contribution to the understanding of inclusive business. Specifically, they contribute by highlighting how the economic and social dimensions are intertwined and by highlighting that the management-thinking perspective, which has dominated in recent decades, should shift toward a more inclusive vision.

The paper represents an attempt to address an inclusive capitalism perspective in the context of marketing. Nevertheless, the conceptual reasoning developed in the paper should be further supported by empirical research carried out in the context of EEs.

The paper has relevant managerial implications that suggest a rethinking of the business model to market with EEs.

The paper contributes to the research on inclusive capitalism by linking it to well-grounded conceptual approaches to business that recapture a harmonious relationship between the economy and society.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how systems thinking contributes to decision making in uncertain contexts that are characteristic of service systems. Based on the assumption that service systems face complex conditions, the paper posits that systems thinking may support the understanding of key issues in service management.

This paper proposes an interpretation of complexity in the context of service systems, which highlights the perspective change that occurs when a systems approach is adopted. The offered conceptual perspective is then brought to an operational level, in spite of the complexity of the decisions driving a viable system, by modelling a service system as a network of agents, resources, processes and decisions through the use of fuzzy logic. The paper reviews service management research streams, and takes a deeper look at the concepts of service systems and complex service systems. The paper then proceeds to discuss how systems thinking contributes to service management by proposing a systems interpretation of complexity.

Service management theories and models may be enhanced by integrating prevailing approaches, based on a quantitative and mechanistic view of service systems dynamics, with systems thinking‐based meta‐models that can be used in better understanding service exchanges. The findings of the paper also show how the integration of an engineering approach can be insightful to the understanding of service systems; adopting a Viable Systems Approach (VSA) as a meta‐model can be useful in fully comprehending market behaviour in uncertain conditions.

The originality of this paper lies in exploring the contribution of systems thinking, in particular of the Viable Systems Approach (VSA), to service management and decision making.

The purpose of this paper is to combine service science (service science, management and engineering, and SSME) and service dominant (S‐D) logic contributions with the network and systems‐based theories of many‐to‐many marketing proposed by Gummesson and the viable system approach (VSA), proposed by Italian researchers and highly diffused in Italy during the 2000s.

This paper is a conceptual analysis based on recent developments in service science, S‐D logic and network/systems theory.

Being grounded in network theory, systems thinking and value co‐creation, many‐to‐many marketing is found to be particularly supportive to both service science and S‐D logic. It is also found that VSA, being broad, interdisciplinary and based on systems theory and resource‐based theory, and with strong influences from biology, sociology and mechanics, is a key to the interpretation of complex phenomena. Both many‐to‐many and VSA embrace the whole and the general while still considering the detail and its contextual dependency. Both theories are highly suitable for analysing and designing service systems.

The network and systemic approach to business offer by many‐to‐many marketing and VSA and applicable to service and the value creation, relationship management and business finalities, are strongly coherent with the one proposed or tacitly implied by service science and S‐D logic.

The paper helps practitioners to better manage service and to enable efficient behaviour within multiple contexts with multiple actors and optimising inter‐systemic relations.

This is believed to be the only paper to apply network theories and the VSA perspective on service.