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The FIFA Museum in Zurich is a division of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and has been opened in 2016 with the aspiration to become one of the key attractions, both in Zurich as well as in the association football context. As with many tourist attractions, staying on top of the game is a challenge. Unlike other museums, the FIFA Museum took an open innovation approach in developing their concept, especially for those parts that deal with visitor interactions. With the goal of being not only a football museum, but also an attractive and leading event location in Switzerland, event ideas were collected using a crowdsourcing approach, managed through a platform run by ATIZO. Through this community, the museum could design attractive event concepts, succeeded to increase visitor engagement and built a loyal base of innovators and future guests. This chapter describes the crowdsourcing methodology applied by the FIFA Museum, critically examines the process, advantages, and disadvantages of the methodology chosen, and concludes by giving recommendations for similar cases. The particular focus lies on the application of the crowdsourcing method in areas where a strong fan community can be involved in the development process, such as, e.g., in the association football context.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the experiences of air passengers in the airside setting of commercial airports. Whilst the concept of liminality has found increased interest in tourism studies, only few studies have contextualized the airside experience as a liminal one. We investigate the role of food and beverage (F&B) consumption in this context as well as factors influencing F&B outlet patronage intentions. Using a European non-hub commercial airport as practical unit, we applied a mixed methods single case-study methodology to investigate F&B outlet choice in the airside setting. It becomes evident that perceptions of liminality play an important role in this context. Findings support the claim that the airport environment constitutes a special context, an encapsuled or protected space; not only for passengers, but also for employees alike. Whilst airports have a certain uniformity to regular travelers, infrequent travelers perceive air travel as an extraordinary activity, often paired with a certain uncertainty about related procedures. Evidence suggests that passengers’ emotional states play a key role in consumption decisions. Depending on travel purpose and direction, passengers showed differing consumption behaviors.

Understanding the airport airside area as a liminoid space and using the concept of boundary work for the transition between home and work realms (and back again) thus serves as a suitable frame of reference to help understand the phenomena that were observed and analyzed in this study. F&B consumption can then be understood to support the mental transition between home and work realms. Our findings thus allow linking the passenger clusters’ different consumption behavior to prevailing emotional states in their transgressions between work and home realm in the liminoid airside context.

Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guiding future research.

We analyzed the literature on service robots as they relate to customers and employees in business journals listed in the Financial Times top 50 journals plus all journals covered in the cross-disciplinary SERVSIG literature alerts.

The analysis of the identified studies yielded multiple observations about the impact of service robots on customers (e.g. overarching frameworks on acceptance and usage of service robots; characteristics of service robots and anthropomorphism; and potential for enhanced and deteriorated service experiences) and service employees (e.g. employee benefits such as reduced routine work, enhanced productivity and job satisfaction; potential negative consequences such as loss of autonomy and a range of negative psychological outcomes; opportunities for human–robot collaboration; job insecurity; and robot-related up-skilling and development requirements). We also conclude that current research on service robots is fragmented, is largely conceptual in nature and focused on the initial adoption stage. We feel that more research is needed to build an overarching theory. In addition, more empirical research is needed, especially on the long(er)-term usage service robots on actual behaviors, the well-being and potential downsides and (ethical) risks for customers and service employees.

Our review focused on the business and service literature. Future work may want to include additional literature streams, including those in computer science, engineering and information systems.

This article is the first to synthesize the business and service literature on the impact of service robots on customers and employees.

The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.

This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.

This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.