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1 – 10 of over 1000Diego Monferrer Tirado, Miguel Angel Moliner Tena and Marta Estrada
This study aims to examine the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels in service ecosystems, analyzing the case of a tourist destination.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels in service ecosystems, analyzing the case of a tourist destination.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was designed based on previously validated scales. The questionnaire was distributed through the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The survey yielded 1,476 valid responses for three types of destinations. Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis were performed to test the hypotheses.
Findings
Aggregate service experience and memorable customer experience (MCE) in service ecosystems are determined by customer experiences at a dyadic level. Service experience at the ecosystem level is formed from ordinary experiences at the actor level, while MCE is formed from extraordinary experiences at the dyadic level. The type of ecosystem moderates the relationships between the variables but does not alter the importance of each of them.
Originality/value
The relationship between the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels of service ecosystems (dyadic vs aggregate) is addressed. A relationship is established between the ordinary and extraordinary character of experiences and their memorability at the ecosystem level.
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Nitha Palakshappa, Sarah Dodds and Loren M. Stangl
The world continues to grapple with grand challenges – climate change, pandemic, poverty, social injustice and diminishing resources – requiring mitigation if we are to focus on…
Abstract
Purpose
The world continues to grapple with grand challenges – climate change, pandemic, poverty, social injustice and diminishing resources – requiring mitigation if we are to focus on well-being and move towards a more sustainable future. Cultivating sustainable ecosystems offers a possible solution. The purpose of this paper is to understand how sustainable organizations at the meso level can nurture sustainable service ecosystems that provide the potential for greater well-being outcomes for individuals, business, society and the planet.
Design/methodology/approach
Case study data is gathered from 11 sustainable fashion organizations operating at the meso level within a complex ecosystem. The analysis includes interviews with founders and/or key managers and secondary information from company websites and publicly available reports.
Findings
The findings identify key value co-creation sustainable practices at the meso level that facilitate the function of the service ecosystem to create well-being outcomes. Value co-creation practices include – embedding a sustainable ethos; implementing sustainable strategies that embrace innovation, transparency and stakeholder collaboration; and incorporating sustainable communication practices that engage.
Originality/value
Encapsulating sustainability within macromarketing and service ecosystems enables the development of a sustainable service ecosystems framework that has the potential to offer enhanced well-being. Implications for marketing practice in terms of important factors that facilitate service-sustainable ecosystems to enhance well-being are considered.
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Jorge Grenha Teixeira, Andrew S. Gallan and Hugh N. Wilson
Humanity and all life depend on the natural environment of Planet Earth, and that environment is in acute crisis across land, sea and air. One of a set of commentaries on how…
Abstract
Purpose
Humanity and all life depend on the natural environment of Planet Earth, and that environment is in acute crisis across land, sea and air. One of a set of commentaries on how service can address the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), the authors focus on environmental goals SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 14 (life below water) and SDG 15 (life on land). This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that incorporates the natural environment into transformative services.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors trace the evolution of service thinking about the natural environment, from a stewardship perspective of the environment as a set of resources to be managed, through an acknowledgement of nonhuman organisms as actors that can participate in service exchange, towards an emergent concept of ecosystems as integrating human social actors and other biological actors who engage fully in value co-creation.
Findings
The authors derive a framework integrating human and other life forms as co-creating actors, drawing on shared natural resources to achieve mutualism, where each actor can have a net benefit from the relationship. Future research questions are posited that may help services research address SDGs 13–15.
Originality/value
The framework integrates ideas from environmental ecosystem literature to inform the nature of ecosystems. By integrating environmental actors and ecological insights into the understanding of service ecosystems, service scholars are well placed to make unique contributions to the global challenge of creating a sustainable future.
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Christian Kowalkowski, Jochen Wirtz and Michael Ehret
Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to…
Abstract
Purpose
Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.
Findings
Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.
Originality/value
This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.
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Emily A. Goad, Kevin S. Chase, David B. Brauer, Ellis Chefor, Nawar N. Chaker, Ruben Rabago, Bryan Hochstein and John D. Hansen
This study aims to integrate research on customer success (CS) management with the service ecosystems perspective of selling to enhance the understanding of the CS management…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to integrate research on customer success (CS) management with the service ecosystems perspective of selling to enhance the understanding of the CS management function and the outcomes selling firms should expect based on implementation of CS management.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply the service ecosystems perspective of selling to describe how CS management is manifested in practice by offering relevant insights and practical industry examples.
Findings
Study findings identify relevant ecosystem actors, acting on behalf of the customer, required for the delivery of desirable customer outcomes. Study findings also link the orchestration efforts of CS managers to theory-based tenets for explanation of how CS management facilitates the attainment of competitive advantages via the thickening and thinning of ecosystem crossing points.
Research limitations/implications
Given that the research is conceptual, additional research that empirically examines this framework and the insights presented would lend further credence to the recommendations the authors suggest.
Practical implications
From a practical perspective, the authors present a “Customer Relationship and Solution Innovation Matrix” which integrates necessary value-creating activities that CS managers perform and the coordination with internal actors that CS managers rely on to create value.
Originality/value
Although the practice of CS management is becoming increasingly common, theoretical approaches capable of explaining the function have been lacking. Similarly, while the service ecosystems perspective redefines selling to encompass a broader set of actors than traditionally examined, practical examinations of the theory are limited. The authors address these issues, integrating both research streams for an enhanced understanding of the CS management function through the service ecosystems perspective theoretical lens.
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Carlos Bauer, John M. Galvan, Tyler Hancock, Gary K. Hunter, Christopher A. Nelson, Jen Riley and Emily C. Tanner
Sales organizations embrace technological innovation. However, salespeople’s willingness to use new technology influences a firm’s return on investment, representing a significant…
Abstract
Purpose
Sales organizations embrace technological innovation. However, salespeople’s willingness to use new technology influences a firm’s return on investment, representing a significant concern for the organization. These concerns highlight tensions regarding the tradeoffs associated with technology implementations. The purpose of this study is to offer insights that help reduce the complexities of sales technology (ST) by exploring the changing dynamics of contemporary business relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper synthesizes the ST literature using the service ecosystem perspective to propose the sales techno-ecosystem (STE) framework, providing new insights into organizational decision-making related to the ongoing digital transformation of sales tasks.
Findings
This synthesis of the ST literature with the service ecosystem seeks to clarify the impact of technology within the evolving nature of buyer–seller relationships by providing four unique perspectives.
Research limitations/implications
Perspective 1 reviews the sales-service ecosystem framework and develops the theoretical underpinnings and relevant terminologies. Perspective 2 summarizes critical aspects of the ST literature and provides foundations for future research in the STE. Perspective 3 offers a more granular view, explicating roles and contexts prevalent in buyer–seller–technology interactions. Perspective 4 provides a set of tenets and advances research questions related to each tenet.
Practical implications
The culmination of these four perspectives is the introduction of five key tenants designed to help guide strategy and research.
Originality/value
The paper advances Hartmann et al. (2018) service ecosystem paradigm by explicating critical aspects of its ST domain to generate insights for theory and practice.
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Jessica Vredenburg, Sommer Kapitan and Sharon Jang
This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to formally conceptualize service mega-disruptions as any far-reaching and unforeseen general environmental stressor or threat that impacts a service organization’s ability to provide a desired level of service. The authors differentiate sudden large-scale general environmental threats from traditional service failures in scope and scale of impact via number of customers and sectors affected and duration and speed of the disruption.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws from service recovery theory to build a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions. The resulting conceptual model maps service failure recovery strategies against a service mega-disruption recovery approach to examine consumer response to changes in service value. This work further articulates additional research needs including conceptualization, measurement and methods as traditional drivers of service recovery and the value of the service experience change in response to service mega-disruptions.
Findings
This work proposes a research agenda to investigate whether service mega-disruptions can bypass the need for service recovery due to a consumer self-moderating process. As past research shows, the less control a service provider has over a failure, the more customers attribute fault to the situation and transfer blame away from an organization. This paper suggests that this self-moderating process disrupts the need for service providers to court forgiveness for a failure with perceptions of similarity and controllability providing an alternate pathway to customer forgiveness. Similarly, it is suggested that service mega-disruptions play a role in transforming service ecosystems into tighter, more contractual systems with less agency for service providers and poorer ability to adjust to market conditions. The duration and longevity of effects on service providers’ control, agency and ability to adjust following a service mega-disruption must be researched further.
Originality/value
This paper builds theory to develop a conceptual model of service mega-disruptions and their role in customer engagement and reshaping the service ecosystem. This paper culminates in the proposition of a research agenda that aims to build research capacity among services marketing scholars as service providers’ coordination and market conditions are challenged by service mega-disruptions.
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Stephen L. Vargo, Julia A. Fehrer, Heiko Wieland and Angeline Nariswari
This paper addresses the growing fragmentation between traditional and digital service innovation (DSI) research and offers a unifying metatheoretical framework.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper addresses the growing fragmentation between traditional and digital service innovation (DSI) research and offers a unifying metatheoretical framework.
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in service-dominant (S-D) logic's service ecosystems perspective, this study builds on an institutional and systemic, rather than product-centric and linear, conceptualization of value creation to offer a unifying framework for (digital) service innovation that applies to both physical and digital service provisions.
Findings
This paper questions the commonly perpetuated idea that DSI fundamentally changes the nature of innovation. Instead, it highlights resource liquification—the decoupling of information from the technologies that store, transmit, or process this information—as a distinguishing characteristic of DSI. Liquification, however, does not affect the relational and institutional nature of service innovation, which is always characterized by (1) the emergence of novel outcomes, (2) distributed governance and (3) symbiotic design. Instead, liquification makes these three characteristics more salient.
Originality/value
In presenting a cohesive service innovation framework, this study underscores that all innovation processes are rooted in combinatorial evolution. Here, service-providing actors (re)combine technologies (or more generally, institutions) to adapt their value cocreation practices. This research demonstrates that such (re)combinations exhibit emergence, distributed governance and symbiotic design. While these characteristics may initially seem novel and unique to DSI, it reveals that their fundamental mechanisms are not limited to digital service ecosystems. They are, in fact, integral to service innovation across virtual, physical and blended contexts. The study highlights the importance of exercising caution in assuming that the emergence of novel technologies, including digital technologies, necessitates a concurrent rethinking of the fundamental processes of service innovation.
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Although the challenges associated with big data are increasing, the question of the most suitable big data analytics (BDA) platform in libraries is always significant. The…
Abstract
Purpose
Although the challenges associated with big data are increasing, the question of the most suitable big data analytics (BDA) platform in libraries is always significant. The purpose of this study is to propose a solution to this problem.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study identifies relevant literature and provides a review of big data adoption in libraries. It also presents a step-by-step guide for the development of a BDA platform using the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem. To test the system, an analysis of library big data using Apache Pig, which is a tool from the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem, was performed. It establishes the effectiveness of Apache Hadoop Ecosystem as a powerful BDA solution in libraries.
Findings
It can be inferred from the literature that libraries and librarians have not taken the possibility of big data services in libraries very seriously. Also, the literature suggests that there is no significant effort made to establish any BDA architecture in libraries. This study establishes the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem as a possible solution for delivering BDA services in libraries.
Research limitations/implications
The present work suggests adapting the idea of providing various big data services in a library by developing a BDA platform, for instance, providing assistance to the researchers in understanding the big data, cleaning and curation of big data by skilled and experienced data managers and providing the infrastructural support to store, process, manage, analyze and visualize the big data.
Practical implications
The study concludes that Apache Hadoops’ Hadoop Distributed File System and MapReduce components significantly reduce the complexities of big data storage and processing, respectively, and Apache Pig, using Pig Latin scripting language, is very efficient in processing big data and responding to queries with a quick response time.
Originality/value
According to the study, there are significantly fewer efforts made to analyze big data from libraries. Furthermore, it has been discovered that acceptance of the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem as a solution to big data problems in libraries are not widely discussed in the literature, although Apache Hadoop is regarded as one of the best frameworks for big data handling.
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Jamie Burton, Victoria Mary Story, Judy Zolkiewski and Nazifa Nisha
Digital Service innovation (DSI) plays a fundamental role in the successful transition from product manufacturer or traditional service provider to a provider of digitally-enabled…
Abstract
Purpose
Digital Service innovation (DSI) plays a fundamental role in the successful transition from product manufacturer or traditional service provider to a provider of digitally-enabled service solutions. Multiple impediments make managing this transformation using digital technologies difficult for firms, their customers and wider ecosystems. Extant knowledge of these digital technology impediments requires synthesizing and mapping.
Design/methodology/approach
A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. DSI tools and terminology are synthesized via thematic analysis. Subsequently, impediments to DSI for servitization (covering barriers, challenges and tensions) faced by actors across three key innovation phases: strategic planning, design planning and implementation, and four interaction levels (Micro, Meso, Macro-environment, Macro-ecosystem) are mapped via template analysis.
Findings
Six impediment categories (external environmental factors, internal firm factors, capabilities, business models and processes, value creation and interaction) encompassing 28 unique impediment types to DSI during servitization are identified. A framework enabling impediment comparison across innovation phases and ecosystem/network interaction levels, revealing that the majority of barriers can be framed as “challenges” was developed.
Originality/value
Whilst literature is emerging relating to digital servitization, there is a lack of research on the role DSI plays in facilitating digital servitization and no comprehensive study of DSI impediments exists. Additionally, consensus around the cross-disciplinary terminologies used is lacking. This study is a structured attempt to map the domain, summarizing the terms, identifying and clarifying impediment categories and providing recommendations for researchers and managers in tackling the latter.
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