Ada Scupola

The Adoption of Internet Commerce by SMEs in the South of Italy: An Environmental, Technological and Organizational Perspective

Abstract This study is an investigation of the environmental, organizational and technological drivers of Internet commerce adoption and implementation in small businesses. To conduct the study, the Tornatsky and Fleischer model was adopted and tested in seven small businesses located in Southern Italy. The main contribution of the study lies in the fact that it shows that the environmental context has a key role in the adoption and implementation of e-commerce in SMEs. This is over and above factors related to technology characteristics (e.g. benefits and barriers) and organizational characteristics (e.g. slack resources) that have been extensively investigated elsewhere. Environmental factors of special importance are government intervention, public administration and external pressure from competitors, suppliers and buyers.

Adoption issues of business-to-business Internet commerce in European SMEs

This article presents the preliminary findings from an explorative case study concerning barriers, benefits and use of SMEs adoption of business-to-business Internet commerce. The main findings were that SMEs embrace the Internet mainly just by chance; the government and public administration are seen as the main change agents in the adoption and diffusion of Internet commerce among SMEs; cost is not an important factor in the adoption decision; setting up an advanced home page with a shopping basket for buying and selling on the Internet is often seen as a minus rather then a plus for competitive advantage; complementary factors among which digital imaging technologies and spreading of English as a common business language have to be developed in order to increase the value of Internet commerce to small business.

Investigating issues and challenges for customer involvement in Business services innovation

Purpose – The paper aims to investigate how customers may contribute to radical innovation in consultancy services and the conditions needed for customers to be involved in such radical service innovations.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a qualitative case study approach including rich descriptions based primarily on interviews to investigate an extreme example of successful customer involvement in the development of radical service innovations at Ramboll, a leading Scandinavian engineering consultancy.Findings – The study reveals that customers may be involved in radical innovation processes to different degrees. However, actively involving customers in radical services innovation require a relationship between the customer company and the service provider that might be described as a partnership in which ongoing learning takes place to develop new solutions. The findings reveal that unsolved problems as well as personal trust are key in making customers involved in radical service innovatio...

Conceptualizing Competences in E-Services Adoption and Assimilation in SMES

This article investigates the competences deemed necessary both at top managerial and individual levels for the successful adoption and assimilation of business-to-business e-services in small and medium size enterprises. To this end, an in-depth case study of a business-to-business e-service system, a Web-based travel reservation system, was conducted. The results show that three main competences, namely vision, value and control, are important at top management level for the primary adoption of e-services. For secondary adoption and assimilation, three categories of competences were identified as being important either to have or to develop at the individual level, namely technical, interpersonal and conceptual skills.

Service innovation in academic libraries: is there a place for the customers?

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate whether management and employees in academic libraries involve users in library service innovations and what these user roles are.Design/methodology/approach – The article first reviews the literature focusing on innovation, new product development, new service development and library science with specific focus on users and management. Subsequently the research uses a case study approach to investigate management and customer involvement in a Danish academic library.Findings – Results from the case study show that academic libraries are making some attempts to draw on customers in service innovations and not only rely on management and employees. The main conclusion is that there are unexplored possibilities for customer involvement in library service innovations.Research limitations/implications – One limitation relates to the difficulty of generalization of the findings to other Danish libraries and especially other national contexts. The other on...

E-Services: Characteristics, Scope and Conceptual Strengths

The concept of e-services has gained increasing use lately. There is, however, no general agreement as to the precise meaning and scope of the term. The research purpose of the present article is, therefore, to discuss the e-service concept, its strengths and scope, and thereby contribute to the general understanding and definition of the term. Furthermore, the article aims at examining one of the primary conditions for the development of e-services, namely the codification of knowledge in connection with knowledge intensive services.

ICT Adoption in Facilities Management Supply Chain: The Case of Denmark

Abstract This article involves a qualitative study of factors impacting the adoption of ICT solutions in the Danish facility management supply chain. The results show that there are a number of drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of ICT solutions in this service sector. These have been grouped under three major categories: organizational factors including strategic and operational factors; external environmental factors including supplier interdependence and industry characteristics; and technological factors including compatibility and complexity. The study is relevant to researchers concerned with ICT adoption, operations and service management (especially facilities management) as well as operation managers and ICT managers.

E-Service Research Trends in the Domain of E-Government: A Contemporary Study

Government ‘e-service’ as a subfield of the e-government domain has been gaining attention to practitioners and academicians alike due to the growing use of information and communication technologies at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. This paper conducts a thorough literature review to examine the e-service research trends during the period between 2005 and 2009 mostly in terms of research methods, theoretical models, and frameworks employed as well as type of research questions. The results show that there has been a good amount of papers focusing on ‘e-Service’ within the field of e-government with a good combination of research methods and theories. In particular, findings show that technology acceptance, evaluation and system architecture are the most common themes, which circa half of the studies surveyed focus on the organizational perspective and that the most employed research methods are case studies and surveys, often with a mix of both types of methodologies.

Managerial perception of service innovation in facility management organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate innovation in the facilities management sector by conducting an empirical study.Design/methodology/approach – This study uses a qualitative research approach to investigate the research question. Data collection includes qualitative semi‐structured interviews with key facility management managers and directors, secondary material such as company brochures and reports and participation to workshops and conferences on facility management.Findings – The main results are that big service providers perceive innovation as a strategic activity and see themselves as innovative companies. Facilities management (FM) service customers with their own FM department present mixed results. Some perceive innovation as a strategic priority and have clear innovation strategies. Others perceive themselves as not being innovative, even though they might be. The organizations belonging to the category “ICT Supplier/consultants” perceive themselves as innovative organizatio...

The impact of electronic commerce on industry structure - the case of scientific, technical and medical publishing

Electronic commerce is becoming one of the drivers of competition and is starting to play an important role in the structural change of industry. This article shows how electronic commerce might affect the Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing sector. The focus is on the electronic journal as a substitute for the paper journal, the new entrants (Internet-based), as well as their implications for the industry structure, with emphasis on disintermediation and electronic intermediation. The paper also argues that most publishers have re-engineered or are re-engineering for electronic commerce, thus operating both in the market-place and the market-space and coexisting with the new Internet-based-only publishers.