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 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 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...

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 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 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 paper seeks to present the use of Rough Sets (RS) theory as a processing method to improve the results in customer satisfaction survey applications. Design/methodology/approach – The research methodology is to apply an innovative tool to discover knowledge on customer behavior...

Purpose – To report on the lessons learned during the implementation of TQM principles in Air China as a response to the dramatic changes in both international and domestic markets. Design/methodology/approach – This research work is based on analysing secondary case studies in the airline...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of the virtual communities' phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports a case study. It explains one of the most successful online strategies developed by a global brand, Coca‐Cola, in Spain....