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This study aims propose an innovative notion of the advanced technology based on the expectation theory and the emotion theory for a case study of the context-aware service system applied to the exhibition service sector.

To evaluate the feasibility of the notion of the advanced technology and the context awareness, the authors have collected and analyzed the data from three stakeholders through the real field applications of the mExhibition service system.

The evaluation results show that customers fairly enjoyed and were satisfied different exhibition customer experience journeys.

The originality of this paper is: facilitation of exquisite customer experience delivery via the advanced technology as evidenced by the mExhibition service system; exhibition service innovation through mExhibition; embodied value co-creation within the exhibition technology and mExhibition service system; and mExhibition commerce realization.

Most existing recommendation systems or technologies are functional-oriented. Recommending services, nevertheless, requires the consideration of service experiences perceived by customers being individually unique and emphasizing the emotional experiences and the co-created value-in-use. This paper aims to present a new recommender system to capture customer emotional needs and address social interactions among service stakeholders.

This paper presents a color imagery-based recommender system (CIRS) capable of capturing customer emotional needs and addressing social interactions among service stakeholders that can collectively co-create the individual value-in-use and beneficial outcomes for customers. Based on the Color Image Scale, the recommender system uses the color imagery format as the uniform representation of customers’ psychological expectations, service providers and the service system, to facilitate the scoring and ranking of recommendations.

This study uses an application context of destination tourism to demonstrate and justify the recommender system’s attempted contributions preliminarily. That is, CIRS can recommend destinations and tour services that meet tourists’ emotional needs with a satisfactory precision of 70 per cent. CIRS can also make stakeholders’ image models evolve over time considering the dynamic interactions among stakeholders. CIRS can also help lesser-known tourism destinations be discovered by tourists who can be emotionally satisfied.

CIRS uses the color imagery as the uniform representation for customers’ expectations, service providers (e.g. small and medium enterprises) and service system (e.g. tourism destinations), considering the continued interactions among the service stakeholders that collectively co-create the individual value-in-use and beneficial outcomes for each customer.

Customer engagement (customers’ behavioral manifestations going beyond customer-firm purchase transactions) has been regarded as strategic imperatives for generating enhanced corporate performance. The plethora of new media has provided customers with different options to interact with firms and other customers. However, the primacy of value-laden interactive customer relationships and value co-creation raises challenges for firms and customers, especially in the context of broader business ecosystems such as brand partnership for extending value co-creation. This study aims to explore how customer engagement with well-designed choreograph of various new media’s channels can increase the value co-creation extent in the context of broader business ecosystems, resulting in higher levels service offerings, experiences and innovation.

This exploratory study presents a new framework of customer engagement that holistically integrates the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations. The framework considers new media’s different information service and technologies (e.g. search engine, social recommender, social media) that can be properly choreographed to achieve a virtuous customer engagement circle.

This paper uses an exemplar framework's instantiation – an information technology enabled engagement platform (called iEngagement) – that can demonstrate how to empower the central companies together with their eco-stakeholders to holistically perform customer engagement utilizing new media toward fruitful customer engagement.

This exploratory study is among the first that addresses the theory and practice of customer engagement within multiple new media and broader business ecosystem. This paper presents a customer engagement framework and an exemplified engagement platform that holistically integrate the elements of multiple new media and broader business ecosystem, for stimulating a virtuous circle of realizing customer engagement toward superior results or innovations.

What makes investors tick? Largely counter-intuitive compared to the findings of most past research, this study explores the possibility that funding investors invest in companies based on social relationships, which could be positive or negative, similar or dissimilar. The purpose of this paper is to build a social network graph using data from CrunchBase, the largest public database with profiles about companies. The authors combine social network analysis with the study of investing behavior in order to explore how similarity between investors and companies affects investing behavior through social network analysis.

This study crawls and analyzes data from CrunchBase and builds a social network graph which includes people, companies, social links and funding investment links. The problem is then formalized as a link (or relationship) prediction task in a social network to model and predict (across various machine learning methods and evaluation metrics) whether an investor will create a link to a company in the social network. Various link prediction techniques such as common neighbors, shortest path, Jaccard Coefficient and others are integrated to provide a holistic view of a social network and provide useful insights as to how a pair of nodes may be related (i.e., whether the investor will invest in the particular company at a time) within the social network.

This study finds that funding investors are more likely to invest in a particular company if they have a stronger social relationship in terms of closeness, be it direct or indirect. At the same time, if investors and companies share too many common neighbors, investors are less likely to invest in such companies.

The author’s study is among the first to use data from the largest public company profile database of CrunchBase as a social network for research purposes. The author ' s also identify certain social relationship factors that can help prescribe the investor funding behavior. Authors prediction strategy based on these factors and modeling it as a link prediction problem generally works well across the most prominent learning algorithms and perform well in terms of aggregate performance as well as individual industries. In other words, this study would like to encourage companies to focus on social relationship factors in addition to other factors when seeking external funding investments.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework of customer expectation management and a reference model of service experience design which are regarded as the basic foundation to model the processes of service experience design for service operation strategies simulating and testing by employing a system dynamics approach.

System dynamics is the key approach which includes causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams used to build the reference model of experience design. Simulations of the processes of service experience design have also been implemented by Vensim^®.

It is found that the proposed reference model involving customer expectation management can successfully capture the key elements of the service experience design within service operation strategies. The system dynamics approach can effectively enable a macro viewpoint of service experience design for service operation strategies and policies.

With the proposed reference model of service experience design and the system dynamics modeling approach, service providers cannot only comprehensively examine the processes of service experience design in detail but also accomplish the strategies testing and simulating. Hence, service providers can make correct decisions to achieve the business goals via the simulation results beforehand.

This paper contributes to analyze and combine the idea of customer expectation management with service experience design and give rise to a unique reference model of service experience design that is shown to be valuable to service operation strategies testing and simulating based on the system dynamics perspective.

The authors seek to propose the notion of ubiquitous proximity e‐service for exploring collective wisdom in the ubiquitous environment. Ubiquitous proximity e‐service highlights the collective effort focused on collecting the user group's power as the reference for ubiquitous trust decisions.

This paper provides some theoretical utility support for ubiquitous proximity e‐service. The “homophily” describes the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. By highlighting the “homophily” of e‐service participants, these isolated individuals can be treated as a group with proximity. The main value of ubiquitous proximity e‐service utilizes the network effect from the collective effort of interpersonal social network.

In order to leap the trust barrier for users to embrace these ubiquitous e‐services, ubiquitous proximity e‐service makes it possible for users to collaborate with their nearby user groups to establish a reliable and trustworthy interaction environment. The simulation outcomes for trust decision quality enhancement show a significant improvement in a variety of environment settings.

A significant value of ubiquitous proximity e‐service lies in the increased possibility of establishing innovative social network relationships. From the interpersonal perspective, unfamiliar strangers can make connections with individuals who are proximal and homoplastic to them. The strength of proximity gives people better chances to make interpersonal connections, including both weak ties and strong ties. By combining those interpersonal tie relationships, ubiquitous proximity e‐service can easily cause information diffusion and effectively encourage collective wisdom.

The paper advocates the utility of ubiquitous proximity e‐service that can be realized in the e‐commerce environment and which enables information diffusion effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a service-dominant (S-D) logic-based input-output analysis approach to systematically measure the effects of technology spillover in the service sector.

This study uses a case to demonstrate the feasibility and contributions of the S-D logic-based input-output analysis approach.

This study adopted the idea of customer involvement to formulate the S-D logic-based input-output analysis approach. Service providers can apply this systematical approach to find potential opportunities to spread information technology and co-create values with customers.

The S-D logic-based input-output analysis approach has elasticity to dynamically employ different perspectives to evaluate the effects of technology spillovers in order for integrity and precision. The proposed approach is to delineate the possible target values that related to specific services based on the notions of operant resources and customer involvement in a selected service sector. Service providers within the service sector have to offer innovative service activities and manage existing services for customers to participate in.

In the service economy era, service value is created from the evaluation of customer experience and it is important to study alliance partner selection for improving service provision. Nevertheless, most of the existing alliance partner selection approaches concentrate on the functional aspects. The purpose of this paper is to provide a novel approach that is customer-centric and emphasizes the emotional aspect of service value.

This paper presents a metaphor-based alliance partner recommendation mechanism (MAPRM) that employs the computing metaphor approach to recommend alliance partners for companies in an innovative way. The main ideas of metaphors are the comparison made between two unlike things that actually have something in common so as to attain innovative thinking.

This study uses the scenario of regional tourism innovation to demonstrate the attempted contributions of MAPRM. The simulation evaluation results show that MAPRM can utilize knowledge and resources from companies to achieve specific alliance goals of satisfying desired customer experiences represented by images that can be analyzed and created based on customers’ feedback and their interactions with companies.

MAPRM aims to assist companies to find appropriate alliance partners which offer potential innovation opportunities for service value provision. It is capable of facilitating the alliance partner selection process and assessing customers’ needs at the same time.