Special Issue of Electronic Markets
Smart Services: The move to customer-orientation
Deadline Extension: March 31, 2017
Guest Editors
- Rainer Alt (Leipzig University, Germany), rainer.alt@uni-leipzig.de
- Haluk Demirkan (University of Washington – Tacoma, USA), haluk@uw.edu
- Jan Fabian Ehmke (Europe University Viadrina, ehmke@europa-uni.de
- Anne Moen (University of Oslo, Norway), anne.moen@medisin.uio.no
- Alfred Winter (Leipzig University, Germany), alfred.winter@imise.uni-
leipzig.de
Typical service industries such as banking, healthcare, education or travel, have shown that value is created in the interaction between service providers and service consumers. The diffusion of advanced information technologies from web services, electronic market platforms and mobile solutions to smart computers has brought them more directly to the users. They enable customers or patients not only to retrieve and contract relevant offerings, but also to configure them according to their individual preferences. However, existing services often still follow an inside-out instead of an outside-in logic. They are designed from the perspective of a specific service provider and fail to support the bundling and coordination of services across multiple service providers. While transactions with individual service providers have been successfully implemented in many solutions, the bundling and tracking of service bundles across service providers, such as banks, hospitals or transportation companies, requires substantial coordination on behalf of the customer today. This special issue aims to contribute to the understanding of how (smart) services contribute in realizing an outside-in perspective as well as “empowered” customers.
Topics
Smart services are based on information technology and have the ability to interact with other services due to distinct knowledge on customer’s preferences and their context. An important trend in smart services is the increasing availability of cognitive assistants (e.g., Siri, Watson, Jibo, Echo, Cortana, Chatbots) to boost productivity and creativity of all the people inside them. This special issue seeks research on the concepts, solutions and findings that help in advancing service-thinking regarding more customer-experience and value co-creation. It is interdisciplinary and invites research from the fields of service marketing, service engineering, service science as well as from applied fields, such as medicine informatics, transportation management, tourism or education. Topics of interest are:
- forms and measurement of customer-orientation
- methods and concepts for service composition
- methods for the coordination/combination/
bundling of services - value co-creation processes, metrics and analytics for smart services
- business models for smart services and new intermediaries
- theories and approaches to understand a customer-dominant logic
- business models and applications for innovation of smart services
- societal impacts of customer-oriented services
- digital transformation processes for customer-experience
- application of customer-dominant logic
- formal representation and modeling of bundled services and customer context
- technological implementations and standardization issue
Additional topic suggestions are welcome. All papers will be peer-reviewed and should conform to Electronic Markets’ publication standards. Electronic Markets is a SSCI-listed journal (IF: 1.404) and supports methodological and theoretical pluralism, i.e. empirical or theoretical work, qualitative research, design science, are all welcome. If you would like to discuss any aspect of the special issue, please contact the guest editors.
Submissions to Electronic Markets have an average of 6,500 words (excluding references) and must be original, not published or under review elsewhere. Electronic Markets welcomes research papers (e.g. regular research, state-of-the-art, case studies) as well as position papers and book reviews. Papers must be submitted via the electronic submission system at http://elma.edmgr.com. Instructions, templates and general information are available at http://www.electronicmarkets.
