Purpose – The structure of health care financing, the lack of vertical and horizontal integration, and the slow translation of basic research into meaningful health outcomes for the population conspire to make innovation in health service delivery a difficult task. However, health service...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce and discuss the concepts of service convergence and service integration, illustrate them in the context of the medical tourism industry, and link them to factors that contributed to the success of a medical tourism firm....

Purpose This study aims to construct an integrated social entrepreneur system in the rural area of Hengshan, Taiwan, that could benefit four stakeholders, namely, tourists, business, community and government. Two social entrepreneur cases demonstrate a mutually beneficial situation of lowering...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the crucial initiation stage of service innovation in professional service firms (PSFs) by individual professionals and the implications for knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper builds theory, based on an...

Purpose – The electric utility industry, unlike most other technology‐intensive industries, does not spend much money or effort on research and development. Many utilities do not possess an in‐house R&D facility, nor is there an R&D line item in their budgets. Over the last several decades...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of how individually designed services are actually developed in small companies. Design/methodology/approach – This study focuses on a small number of enterprises over a relatively long period. The study has been using a...

Purpose Creating value through service innovation requires new processes and ways of communicating to multiple stakeholders. Institutions and stakeholders within the service ecosystem, however, often resist change. Adopting a new service strategy entails two distinct costs – monetary and...

The development of a customer portfolio is a logical process for the development of a business. Conceptual work, using a range of independent variables, has been undertaken in the past decade but few (if any) results of its application have been documented. Shows how a fabric supplier has...

Business markets are complex. Sellers have to deal with customised demand, both passive and active markets, multi‐person interactions and interconnected relationships. Reports the case study of HDoX, a producer of hydrogen peroxide, an industrial chemical that has wide applications from the...

Much attention has been paid to the pricing of goods, but services now constitute almost half of the US economy and they have their own pricing requirements. Services differ from goods in that the choice of pricing structure is more fluid, as for example in determining the unit of charging. In...