Special Issue of the International Journal of Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Technology (IJSSMET)
Service Innovation and Marketing in Emerging Markets
Submission Due Date: 3/25/2019
Guest Editors: Pankaj Deshwal, Umang Soni, Belem Barbosa, Beata Gotwald
Introduction
The concept of service Innovation was first discussed in Miles (1993) and has been developed in the past two decades. It is used to refer to many things. These include but not limited to:
1. Innovation in services, in service products – new or improved service products (commodities or public services). Often this is contrasted with “technological innovation”, though service products can have technological elements. This sense of service innovation is closely related to service design and “new service development”.
2. Innovation in service processes – new or improved ways of designing and producing services. This may include innovation in service delivery systems, though often this will be regarded instead as a service product innovation. The innovation of this sort may be technological, technique- or expertise-based, or a matter of work organization (e.g. restructuring work between professionals and paraprofessionals).
3. Innovation in service firms, organizations, and industries – organizational innovations, as well as a service product and process innovations, and the management of innovation processes, within service organizations.
Many kinds of literature on what makes for successful innovations of this kind comes from the New Service Development research field. Service design practitioners have also extensively discussed the features of effective service products and experiences. One of the key aspects of many service activities is the high involvement of the client/customer/user in the production of the final service. Without this co-production (i.e. interactivity of service production), the service would often not be created. This co-production, together with the intangibility of many service products, causes service innovation to often take forms rather different from those familiar through studies of innovation in manufacturing. Innovation researchers have, for this reason, stressed that much service innovation is hard to capture in traditional categories like product or process innovation. The co-production process and the interactions between the service provider and the client can also form the focus of innovation. A growing number of the professional association have service sections that promote service innovation research, including INFORMS, ISSIP, and others.
The marketing orientation is perhaps the most common orientation used in contemporary marketing. It is a customer-centric approach that involves a firm basing its marketing program on products that suit new consumer tastes. Firms adopting a marketing orientation typically engage in extensive market research to gauge consumer desires, use R&D to develop a product attuned to the revealed information, and then utilize promotion techniques to ensure consumers are aware of the product’s existence and the benefits it can deliver.
Objective
In order to survive and thrive in the increasingly dynamic business environment firms need to be sensitive to emergent technological trends and focus on the innovative capacity of the firm. Service innovation is a broad concept that encompasses various dimensions such as service development processes, learning, organizational adaptation, and etc. Despite the growing literature on innovation, most of the focus has been placed on tangible products (e.g., new product development). Only a few studies tackled service innovation. Compared to tangible products, service has the characteristics of intangibility, inseparability, perishability, and variability. These features result in increased variance in the service delivery process, which further lead to greater risks associated with innovations. Thus, more research on service innovation is demanded by both practitioners and academics. Service innovation has gained mounting attention from different fields, including marketing, economics, information systems, and strategy. However, research on service innovation remains scant despite the fact that both practitioners and academics acknowledge the transformative power of service innovation. Thus, this special issue makes a unique and valuable contribution in sparking more theory building and future research on this topic.
Recommended Topics
- State of the art critical reviews in service innovation
- Empirical studies on service innovation in hospitality and tourism
- Knowledge sharing, knowledge management, service innovation performance
- Employee engagement (emotional, cognitive, behavioral) and service innovation
- Customer engagement and well-being through service innovation
- Customer co-creation in service innovation
- Service innovation through emergent technologies, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and robots
- Service innovation through data analytics
- Service innovation and its impact on service experience and service quality
- Social platform and the sharing economy
- Customers’ acceptance and adoption of service innovation
- Service innovation and organizational performance.
- Application of new methodologies to understand and examine service innovation.
- Conceptualizations of customer experience and consumer journey
- Organisational/enabler perspectives of customer journeys and customer experience management strategies and practices
- Cognitive, emotional, sensory, social and spiritual dimensions of customer experiences
- Applications of emerging frameworks to understand consumer journeys and touchpoints
- Issues and opportunities in consumer journey mapping
- Managing service design, service encounters, and customer experience
- Open innovation, co-creation and customer engagement approaches in experience design
- Key drivers and consequences of customer experience (face-to-face and virtual perspectives)
- Application of service encounter and the role of technology
- Influence of social media interaction on specific customer touchpoints in event experiences
- Role of customer touchpoints in smart tourism destinations and experiences
Guest Editors
Dr. Pankaj Deshwal
Assistant Professor
Division of Management
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, University of Delhi, India
Dr. Umang Soni
Assistant Professor
MPAE Division
Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, University of Delhi, India
Dr. Belem Barbosa
Professor
Institute of Accounting and Administration (ISCA-UA)
University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
Dr. Beata Gotwald
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Management
University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland
Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this special theme issue on Service Innovation and Marketing in Emerging Markets on or before 25 March, 2019. All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication. INTERESTED AUTHORS SHOULD CONSULT THE JOURNAL’S GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at
http://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/.
All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind, peer review basis. Papers must follow the APA style for reference citations.
All submissions and inquiries should be directed to the attention of:
Dr. Pankaj Deshwal
Guest Editor
International Journal of Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Technology (IJSSMET)
E-mail: pankajdeshwal@gmail.com
