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The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between the application of smart electronic systems, firm characteristics and efficient energy consumption: a case of public universities in Uganda.

The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative approach as well as descriptive cross-sectional survey design tantamounting to an experimental-observation approach. A sample of four public academic universities were explored using primary data. A semi-structured questionnaire together with an evaluation form and a tested experimental kit (from one of the leading electronics centres in Uganda) was used to examine the consumption rates of different electronic appliances of less than 30 Amps. Further, a Pearson product moment correlation (r) analysis was also used to determine the direction of a relationship among the variables together with a linear relationship (regression) to predict a linear association of one or more variables. Recommendations were also given.

Smart electronic systems make a significant determining factor to both firm characteristics (age, number of students, administrative staff and support staff) as well as efficient energy consumption. Nonetheless, there is no significant difference of efficient energy consumption as far as firm characteristics are concerned.

Results support the contributions of the theory of technology and acceptance model by affirming that a number of factors influence the usefulness and ease of use of the smart electronic systems, which in turn influence energy consumption.

Universities' management should endeavour to install smart electronic systems. But still, government should try to lower taxes on smart electronic systems and genuine agents should be named for easy and affordable access of the users, universities inclusive.

The study contributes towards a theoretical position by affirming the usefulness of technology acceptance model for efficient energy consumption in public universities.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2019-0083

The purpose of this paper is to identify strategic options and challenges that arise when an industrial firm moves from providing smart service toward providing a platform.

This conceptual study takes on a multidisciplinary research perspective that integrates concepts, theories and insights from service management and marketing, information systems and platform economics.

The paper outlines three platform types – smart data platform, smart product platform and matching platform – as strategic options for firms that wish to evolve from smart service providers to platform providers.

Investigating smart service platforms calls for launching interdisciplinary research initiatives. Promising research avenues are outlined to span boundaries that separate different research disciplines today.

Managing a successful transition from providing smart service toward providing a platform requires making significant investments in IT, platform-related capabilities and skills, as well as implement new approaches toward relationship management and brand-building.

The findings described in this paper are valuable to researchers in multiple disciplines seeking to develop and to justify theory related to platforms in industrial scenarios.

This study aims to recognize industry 4.0 opportunities and challenges associated with the co-creation of value in industrial services and to propose a theoretical framework for smart industrial services systems.

The authors carried out a systematic literature review based on the systematic search flow method; thereafter, the authors used the content analysis proposed by Bardin (2011) to analyze the resulting portfolio.

The authors identified a total of five industry 4.0 opportunities and five challenges for co-creating value in industrial services. Drawing upon these findings, this paper builds a theoretical framework for the smart industrial services system, in which the industry 4.0 opportunities arise from the digitally mediated inter-firm interactions and the challenges related to the resources of this system.

This study may not have enabled a complete coverage of all existing peer-reviewed articles in the field of value co-creation in industrial services associated with the industry 4.0 technologies. Also, the framework is constrained by being theoretical rather than empirically grounded.

The findings give managers support to devise strategies for overcoming the barriers that impede them from taking advantage of the opportunities offered by industry 4.0 for co-creating value in industrial services.

This paper’s uniqueness is to identify the industry 4.0 opportunities and challenges for value co-creation in the context of industrial services and to propose a framework for the smart industrial services system.

Flexible light-emitting textile display is designed with floats for electronic elements covering and electronic contacts insulation what at the same time provides an opportunity to develop aesthetic design of the display in the single piece construction of material. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Display consists of interwoven electrically conductive yarns, non-conductive yarns and SMD LEDs connected to conductive yarns. Industrial jacquard weaving machine have been used, weave patterns were designed in PC-Edit software.

Weave can be used as a tool to build and evolve electrotextile. Exploring weaving techniques and perceiving electronic circuit as a weave pattern, new approaches can be developed in electrotextile design field.

Connections of electronic elements and conductive textile materials still is actual problem what should be explored in further research.

Flexible light emitting textile display can be used as output interface integrated into communication clothing by representing different animated images directly on clothing. Display also can be used for accessories, room and auto interior etc. applications.

Paper describes method of light source integration directly into textile structure, combining functional and visual design of textile display.

This study aims to provide a flexible and cost-effective solution of 3D heterogeneous integration for applications such as micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) applications and smart sensor systems.

A novel 3D system-in-package (SiP) based on stacked silicon submount technology was successfully developed and well-demonstrated by the fabrication and assembly process of a selected smart lighting module.

The stacked module consists of multiple layers of silicon submounts which can be designed and fabricated in parallel. The bonding and interconnecting process is quite simple and does not require complicated equipment. The 3D stacking design offers higher silicon efficiency and miniaturized package form factor. The submount wafer can be assembled and tested at the wafer level, thus reducing the cost and improving the yield.

The embedding design presented in this paper is applicable for modules with limited number of passives. When it comes to cases with more passive devices, new process needs to be developed to achieve fast, inexpensive and reliable assembly.

The presented 3D SiP design is novel for applications such as smart lighting, Internet of Things, MEMS systems, etc.

This paper presents an IT system – Student Connectivity Module (SCM) – designed to support administration of student exchange between universities in different countries, developed under the EU seventh Framework Program. The purpose of this paper is to share the acquired knowledge on existing difficulties in mobility management, propose solutions to those problems, and present results of system validation using its prototype deployed at two universities.

Prior to the system design, the needs, plans and expectations concerning the academic IT services were surveyed among 100 universities. On this basis, in close with prospective system users, an original peer-to-peer system was developed using top-down model-driven and agile software development techniques.

The barriers to effective interoperation of academic information systems (AIS) were revealed: first, diversity and heterogeneity of campus IT solutions; second, differences in patterns of international student mobility flow; third, diversity in national personal data protection policies; and fourth, lack of standards for e-data exchange. The SCM system overcomes these problems by adopting platform-independent IT solutions, web-services, a network of trusted authority servers, and a novel “quasi-standard” solution for e-data exchange, with the use of home university campus cards to access facilities at host institutions.

The management of foreign student exchange is a complicated process. It involves students, faculty, administrative staff and external institutions. To the authors knowledge, there is no other comprehensive networked IT system available to facilitate administration of student mobility, make it better controlled, less laborious and faster, in a secure way. The IT solution contributes to overcoming the current barriers to academic mobility within Europe and elsewhere.

Consumers' perceptions of product intelligence affect their willingness to accept smart offerings. This paper explores how people perceive various smart products based on their smartness profiles, composed of five distinct smartness facets. Additionally, the study investigates how these perceptions of product intelligence impact consumers' evaluation of factors that either promote or impede the adoption of smart products. These factors are examined as potential mediators in the adoption process. This paper aims to determine if the value-based adoption model can be applied to a broad range of smart service systems.

Consumers assessed one of 28 smart products in a scenario-based quantitative study. Multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the conceptual model, taking the nested data structure into account.

The findings show that product smartness essentially enhances usage intention via adoption drivers (enjoyment and usefulness) and reduces usage intention via adoption barriers (intrusiveness). In particular, the ability to interact in a humanlike manner increases the benefits consumers perceive, which in turn increases consumer acceptance. Only the smartness characteristic of awareness impairs usage intention, mediated by the perceived benefits of enjoyment and usefulness.

In contrast to previous research, which usually focuses on single smart products, this work examines a variety of different products, which allows for better transferability of the results to other smart offerings. Furthermore, prior research has mainly focused on single facets of product smartness or researched smartness on an aggregated level. By considering the consumer perception of each smartness facet, the authors gain deeper insights into the perceptual differences regarding product smartness and how this affects technology adoption via conflicting key acceptance drivers and barriers.

This article provides an in-depth understanding of customer experience with smart services, examines customer perceptual responses to smart and connected service environments and enriches this understanding by outlining how contextual factors (in terms of goals, activities, actors and artifacts) influence the customer experience.

This study adopts a qualitative approach in order to understand customer experience in the smart energy service setting. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 31 participants forming three groups of energy service customers: advanced smart energy (ASE) customers, electric mobility (EM) customers and high-consumption (HC) customers.

The findings show that customer experience with smart services involves a multidimensional set of perceptual responses, comprising specific smart service dimensions (e.g. controllability, visibility, autonomy); relationship dimensions (relationships with the service provider and with the community); and traditional technology-enabled service dimensions (e.g. ease of use, accessibility). The analysis of contextual factors such as goals, activities, actors and artifacts shows that smart services enable a more autonomous experience, wherein customers can integrate a myriad of actors and artifacts and expect the main service provider to support them in taking the lead.

Smart technologies have profoundly changed the service environment, but research on customer experience with smart services is scarce. This study characterizes smart services, provides an in-depth understanding of customer experience in this new context, and discusses relevant implications for management and service research.

In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.

This conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.

Through the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

Service research offering a view of both the dark and bright sides of smart technology remains scarce. This paper embraces a critical perspective and examines the conflicting outcomes of smart services on the customer experience (CX), with a specific focus on chatbots.

This study uses empirical research methods to examine a single case study where an online retail service provider implemented a chatbot for customer service. Using discourse analysis, we analysed 7,167 conversations between customers and the chatbot over a two-year period.

The analysis identifies seven general themes related to the effects of the chatbot on CX: interaction quality, information gathering, procedure literacy, task achievement, digital trust, shopping stress and shopping journey. We illuminate both positive (i.e. having a pleasant interaction, providing information, knowing procedures, improving tasks, increasing trust, reducing stress and completing the journey) and negative outcomes (i.e. having an unpleasant interaction, increasing confusion, ignoring procedures, worsening tasks, reducing trust, increasing stress and abandoning the journey).

The paper develops a comprehensive framework to offer a clearer view of chatbots as smart services in customer care. It delves into the conflicting effects of chatbots on CX by examining them through relational, cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions.