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Future service interactions are anticipated to use humanoid robots in a society that is shifting to a digitalized era. Currently, it is evident that many businesses are replacing service interactions with self-service technologies (SSTs). This movement creates substantial societal changes that researchers have not paid sufficient attention to comprehend. In this setting, the purpose of this study is to examine the social drivers that influence customer mobility toward co-creating value via SSTs. The study also seeks to discover variations in customers' willingness and capacity to adopt SSTs.

To fulfill the research aims, a qualitative technique was adopted, with semistructured interviews conducted with 25 SST users from varied demographic backgrounds. To recruit individuals for the study, a nonprobabilistic purposeful sampling technique was adopted, with the goal of employing information-rich instances. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The study identified eight social drivers that are important in the customer transition toward co-creating value with SSTs. According to the study, SSTs are characterized as a social trend in which adoption is accepted (social norm) and modifies social connections in a new direction. Using SSTs has evolved into a socializing tool that gives people social acknowledgment. Some people see SSTs as social pressure, putting them at a disadvantage if they do not adopt. People, on the other hand, acquire sufficient social support and independence to use SSTs. Customers were categorized into four groups depending on their willingness and ability to embrace SSTs: trendsetters, dreamers, old-fashioned and stragglers.

In practice, service providers can use this knowledge to successfully promote their SSTs and create enhanced client experiences through technological interfaces.

The study adds new knowledge by identifying social determinants in customer shifts toward SSTs, a phenomenon that has not been studied previously, and it adds to marketing theory by proposing a typology to group customers based on their ability and willingness to embrace SSTs.

Co-creation of services (CCOS) is a collaborative strategy that emphasises customer involvement and their expertise to increase the value of the service experience. In the service ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role in value co-creation. Therefore, this study is undertaken to empirically uncover how AI can empower CCOS.

The source data were collected from 305 service provider respondents and quantitative methodology was applied for data analysis.

New service development augmented with AI provides tangible value to service providers while also providing intangible value to supportive customers. With AI, service providers adapt to new innovations and enrich additional information, which eventually outperforms human-created services.

AI adoption for CCOS empowerment in service businesses brings “service-market fit”, which represents the significant benefits wherein customers contribute to creativity, intuition, and contextual awareness of services, and AI contributes to large-scale service-related analysis by handling volumes of data, service personalisation, and more time to focus on challenging problems of the market.

This study presents theoretical concepts on AI-empowered CCOS, AI technological innovativeness, customer participation in human-AI interaction, AI-powered customer expertise, and perceived benefits in CCOS, and subsequently discusses the CCOS empowerment framework. Then, it proposes a novel conceptual model based on the theoretical concepts and empirically measures and validates the intention to adopt AI for CCOS empowerment. Overall, the study contributes to novel insight on empowering service co-creation with AI.

This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the prolonged consumption journey and how they are sustained by service providers’ use of habit-boosting strategies. Existing research is critically evaluated, and a research agenda is provided to inspire and guide future research.

This paper develops a conceptual framework that integrates habit and transformative consumer intervention theories with customer journey literature to explain the role of habit in sustaining prolonged consumption journeys. Habit-boosting strategies are introduced as mechanisms for service providers to facilitate their customers’ prolonged consumption journeys.

This paper argues that habit strength is a limited operant resource that often lacks resource integration efficiency and hinders customers’ abilities to sustain prolonged consumption journeys. Four distinct habit-boosting strategies are identified that provide the potential for service providers to facilitate their customers’ prolonged consumption journeys.

This study presents a typology of habit-boosting strategies and a research agenda that discusses a range of practically relevant and theoretically insightful contributions.

The study aims to investigate the impact of technological innovation, such as blockchain, in the music field from a value co-creation perspective, highlighting how it is determining a radical change in the business model and value creation process.

To shed light on how blockchain adoption is reconfiguring the music industry, the authors adopted a qualitative-based approach based on a case study, allowing us to investigate value co-creation at three levels (macro, meso and micro) through exchange and integration of multi-actor resources.

The authors found that blockchain adoption in the music industry can singularly shape the business model, representing a powerful tool to enhance inter-organizational cooperation in value creation. It effectively deals with operational and business issues, besides financial transactions, profoundly impacting both the creation and distribution of value within the supply chain.

The research contributes to a better understanding of innovation adoption in a specific setting, the music industry, giving support and guidance for players working in this ecosystem. The blockchain-music link helps close the gap between music and society through technology, thus providing a foundation for future research.

The paper provides new insights into the antecedents and mechanisms of value co-creation, spanning macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of context. It also illustrates the factors underpinning Bitsong viability to embed the value co-creation perspective in designing the business model within a value network.

The paper discusses the use of co-design for staff professional learning within higher education. It suggests that three distinct approaches to professional learning can be characterised as help-yourself platforms/services, drive-by workshops and co-design workshops. It makes pragmatic suggestions for where co-design might be used and heuristics for its successful use, based upon the authors' collective experiences.

This practitioner paper presents a case-study of co-design in a university context. Staff from across disciplinary boundaries were brought together to co-design novel learning experiences for students for a non-traditional context.

Findings from a case study are used to highlight the strengths of a co-design approach, as understood through the lenses of networked learning and self-determination theory. It juxtaposes co-design for staff learning with other approaches and finds it to be valuable and underutilised.

The research discusses a single case study involving two workshops with a sample size of 112 participants. It is included as an example of co-design for professional learning in higher education.

Co-design for professional learning in higher education is poorly understood and presently underutilised. This paper addresses this gap by presenting an example of co-design for professional learning in higher education and theorising its significance.

The purpose of this study is to develop a new numerical algorithm to simulate the phase-field model.

First, the derivative of the temporal direction is discretized by a second-order linearized finite difference scheme where it conserves the energy stability of the mathematical model. Then, the isogeometric collocation (IGC) method is used to approximate the derivative of spacial direction. The IGC procedure can be applied on irregular physical domains. The IGC method is constructed based upon the nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS). Each curve and surface can be approximated by the NURBS. Also, a map will be defined to project the physical domain to a simple computational domain. In this procedure, the partial derivatives will be transformed to the new domain by the Jacobian and Hessian matrices. According to the mentioned procedure, the first- and second-order differential matrices are built. Furthermore, the pseudo-spectral algorithm is used to derive the first- and second-order nodal differential matrices. In the end, the Greville Abscissae points are used to the collocation method.

In the numerical experiments, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are assessed through two examples, demonstrating its performance on both rectangular and nonrectangular domains.

This research work introduces the IGC method as a simulation technique for the phase-field crystal model.

This paper aims to develop a model that supports public organisations in making informed strategic decisions as to which public services are most suitable to be improved through co-creation. Thus, it first identifies the features that make public services (un)suitable for co-creation and then applies this knowledge to develop a multi-criteria decision support model for the assessment of their co-creation readiness.

The decision support model is the result of design science research. While its structure is determined by a qualitative multi-criteria decision analysis, its substance builds on a content analysis of Web of Science papers and over a dozen empirical case studies.

The model is comprised of 13 criteria clustered into two groups: service readiness criteria from the perspective of service users and service readiness criteria from the perspective of a public organisation.

The model attributes rely on a limited number of empirical cases and references from the literature review. The model was tested by only one public organisation on four of its services.

The paper shifts the research focus from organisational properties and capacity, as the key co-creation drivers and barriers, to features of public services as additional factors that affect the prospect of co-creation. Thus, it makes a pioneering step towards the conceptualisation of the idea of “service readiness for co-creation” and the development of a practical instrument that supports co-creation in the public sector.

This study aims to investigate how to manage the stressors that facility managers (FMs) face with the aim of reducing their stress and strain levels.

Using the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, stressors are operationalized from job demands, job resources and personal resources constructs. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from FMs based in Singapore.

FMs have significantly high levels of stress, but they are able to manage this well. Job demands that cause stress and strain are those relating to insufficient time to complete the work and difficulties in handling the work. The lack of job resources in terms of lack of organizational support and inadequate stress mitigation programs are associated with high levels of stress and strain.

The limitations are the relatively small sample size and absence of a database of FMs in Singapore, and correlation is not causation when determining the association between stressors and stress and strain.

Based on the recommendations, employers and FMs may manage the specific stressors identified so that FMs’ stress and strain levels are under control to enable them to work optimally.

This research discovered that the JD-R model is moderated by certain features of facilities management and FMs. When these features are present, FMs are predisposed to more stressors, and higher stress and strain. For the facilities management profession, the discovery is that there are significantly more job demands: for in-house FMs compared to those working for outsourced firms; for FMs who need to carry out estate and asset management, landlord activities and facility planning compared to FMs who focus on operations and maintenance; and for FMs who work longer than five days compared to those who work a five-day week.

Online customer communities have become a strategic tool for business-to-business (B2B) firms to drive collaboration among customers around the company’s products and services. This paper aims to argue that the three social capital dimensions, that is, structural, relational and cognitive, themselves driven by brand community trust, can affect brand loyalty for the organization.

The authors use a survey to collect data and structural equation modeling to test the conceptual framework by collecting data from 214 participants across three online B2B communities operated by three technology firms in India.

Brand community trust is found to have a strong association with social network ties, identification and norm of reciprocity and shared vision. These three have concomitant effects on the quality of customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions. Such communication generates functional, emotional and social benefits, which, in turn, curate brand loyalty.

The authors’ findings guide community managers in leveraging such conversations in shaping customer loyalty for the corporate brand.

This work provides an integrated framework to explain the important role of C2C interactions in B2B online brand communities.