Value Co-Creation in Fitness Centers

The purposes of this chapter were (1) to identify the role of customer citizenship behavior (CCB) in value co-creation and (2) to examine the relationships among CCB, perceived value, satisfaction, and repurchase intention of customers in the context of fitness centers. Data were collected from customers at commercial fitness clubs in the region of Greater Taipei. The results showed that CCB has a positive influence on perceived value and satisfaction, which in turn have positive influences on repurchase intention. Besides, perceived value has a positive influence on satisfaction. Although a direct relationship between CCB and repurchase intention was not found, an indirect influence of customer citizenship behavior through perceived value and satisfaction on repurchase intention was revealed. The findings of this chapter fill the academic gaps in the literature regarding the role of CCB on value co-creation in fitness centers. It also provides practical implications for fitness centers to vigorously encourage customers to act with citizenship behaviors.

Co-Creation and Healthcare Operations Management

Service research has produced a definition that sees services as the integration of customers' and producers' resources to co-create value. Clear articulation of hitherto obscure phenomena enables sharper thinking on how such phenomena could be managed. This article discusses the implications of co-creation in healthcare, a sector of society that is perceived as difficult to manage. Co-creation is here understood as a variable that has different intensity and significance in different areas of healthcare. The Demand – Supply –based operating logic (DSO) is used to segment health service production into areas where co-creation appears in different roles.

Modelling and Simulation Perspective in Service Design

This chapter discusses the development of improved citizen services taking into consideration integration of agent-based modelling and simulation experience into conceiving, design and implementation activities with a strong focus on technology enabled service systems. Service design is formalized here towards the integration of customer experience, validated through service interaction modelling. Integration of user experience at design stage in the value co-creation process is a possible immediate evolution direction of projects in the Smarter Cities perspective. Guidelines for integrating a modelling and simulation perspective in service design are presented along with the Socio-Technical Systems Engineering process. The case study presented here is dedicated to Smart Transport. The chapter opens a larger discussion on specific research directions and knowledge transfer related to Smart Transport as highlighted in EU projects.

E-Service Innovation in Rural Africa Through Value Co-Creation

E-Services have great potential, even in resource-poor environments such as in sub-Saharan Africa. However, contextual factors pose significant challenges for development, feasibility, deployment and sustainability of e-services. This chapter presents a case of e-service value co-creation in a rural context, with targeted end users in regions characterized by limited electricity infrastructure and poor or absent internet, strong diversity in languages spoken, high illiteracy rates and limited purchasing power. It offers a methodology to upfront analyze business model sustainability for e-service innovation in severely resource-constrained contexts. This is illustrated by an extensive case study in which a voice-based microblogging e-service was developed and deployed with local stakeholders in rural Mali.

Value Co-Creation in Education

The case study presents the opportunity to co-create, faced by a new department (department of mechanical engineering) created in an already existing college of ten years standing. The mechanical department had the option of either following the procedures established by other departments or creating its own procedures. The systems existing in the college were based on treating the student as the customer. In reality, the objective of any student is to get employed, immediately after the prescribed period of study. Therefore, the employer must be the customer and the student must be the product of the system. With this mindset, all existing procedures were revisited. The student and faculty co-created several procedures to differentiate themselves to suit the needs of their employers. The case study elaborates on the needs and approaches taken to achieve this differentiated status.

Balancing Value Co-Creation

Co-creation of services in tourism industry is accorded in this work as a shared-responsibility by the service providers, local communities, and tourists who interact and collaborate to co-produce improved service offerings for a valuable experience. The process of creating improved services involves a state of harmony and balance within and among the tourism elements such as ecology, culture, and human resources for the protection, preservation, and sustainability of the tourism environment. People attach notable value to experiences, and tourism is one of the greatest sources of life experiences. From this perspective, the authors, through systematic literature review, attempted to align the emerging concept of creating value in service ecosystem to tourism for a more meaningful touristic experience.

QPLAN

As business competition increases, there is pressure on software development projects to become more productive and efficient. Previous research has shown that quality planning is a key factor in enhancing project performance. Thus, this article reports on the successful development and implementation of a tool (QPLAN) that enhances software development project performance by evaluating the planning quality of any type of software project and introducing best planning practices (such as references from historical data) that suggest how to manage projects in an appropriate manner, including encompassing lessons learned and involving the customer in the development process. This is applied research aimed at solving a real problem; thus, Design Science Research was adopted as the research methodology and the design science research process (DSRP) model was selected to conduct it. This artifact was designed for the project management literature, and implemented and validated in 11 organizations in five countries.

Value Co-Creation Approach for Improving Performance of Outsourced Projects

This chapter uses value co-creation approach to improve performance of contracted projects. Without value co-creation, there are always two projects that are performed separately: one is the contractor's project, and the other one is the customer's project, which consists of all the activities for initiating, evaluating and specifying the project as well as controlling and supporting it. These activities form a project, which is often disregarded as a project. Both customer and contractor regard the other side activities as external tasks under the responsibility of their owner. In effect, the two projects are interrelated and form a unified integrated project. The chapter shows that the unified project behaves very differently than either side expects; and its critical activities are different from those of the separate projects. In addition, there are great strategic benefits that are product of the value co-creation approach and potential synergy which are discussed in the chapter.

Strategic Relationships

Strategic relationships between entities shape the nature of collaboration and competition, as well as the competition for collaborators in markets - customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and others (Spohrer, Kwan, & Fisk, 2014). Rethinking strategic relationships from a service science perspective is the focus of this chapter. The rise of the collaborative, sharing, or more accurately, platform-enabled person-to-person value co-creation economy has increased the dynamic nature of markets across diverse industries and regional jurisdictions. Within the service science literature, “service” is defined as value co-creation interactions and outcomes between entities, all happening over time, space, and scale as part of the evolving ecology of nested, networked service system entities (Spohrer & Maglio, 2010). In this chapter, three types of service system entities are compared and contrasted from the perspective of strategic relationships: businesses, nations, and NFL sport teams.

An Analysis of the Agile Theory and Methods in the Light of the Principles of the Value Co-Creation

The traditional methods for managing projects, i.e., the methods based on the Waterfall model, consider a project as successful if the initial commitments are respected at the end of the project. This means that the value provided to the stakeholders is evaluated according to the fulfilment of a contract originally signed. In this chapter, the author discusses the notion of value and value co-creation in the scope of the project management with a focus on the computing industry. Indeed, a promising theory for managing software implementation projects, called the Agile theory, seems to comply with some principles of the value co-creation. The Agile theory is first compared to the traditional project management frameworks and, then, to the principles of the value co-creation. Lastly, a review of the most used agile methods is proposed. This helps the reader to choose an agile method which is the most compliant with the value co-creation principles.