The long tail phenomenon has been heavily discussed in recentyears. What has been neglected so far is its striking relevance forelectronic services. Whereas consumers expectations about informationgoods are often vague and transient, their requirements are pronouncedand specific when it comes to...

The fundamental paradigm shift from a product- to a service-oriented economy implies novel technical and organizational challenges. The value generated by a service is mainly represented by intangible elements exposed at execution (Hill 1977). Therefore, a service consumer expects a service to...

Innovation and technological change has always been recognized as a motor for economicgrowth in economic literature. It is also agreed amongst economists that competition fostersinnovation, and thus, is an essential component of economic progress (Teece, 1992).Coase (1937, p. 388) remarks in his...

Once serving the whole value chain by what has become known as vertical integration,companies have long since started to outsource value creation processesto specialized partners. Moreover, societal changes have induced a paradigm shiftfrom product-driven to service-dominated value creation....

This paper proposes an approach for evaluating the relationship witha customer, leading to the creation of a Customer Intimacy Grade (CIG), acrossmultiple levels of granularity: employee, team, business unit and wholeorganization. Our approach focuses on B2B service organizations whichprovide...

The current trend towards dynamic and highly scalableservice provisioning fosters the rise of Software as a Service(SaaS) platforms and so called Compute Clouds. Theon-demand provisioning of services gains more and moreinfluence. For offering enriched services that are capableof performing...