Francesca Cabiddu

Open Voucher and the Tourist Season in Sardinia

Customer service is a key component of a firm’s value proposition and a fundamental driver of differentiation and competitive advantage in nearly every industry. Moreover, the relentless coevolution of service opportunities with novel and more powerful information technologies has made this area exciting for academic researchers who can contribute to shaping the design and management of future customer service systems. We engage in interdisciplinary research—across information systems, marketing, and computer science—in order to contribute to the service design and service management literature. Grounded in the design-science perspective, our study leverages marketing theory on the service-dominant logic and recent findings pertaining to the evolution of customer service systems. Our theorizing culminates with the articulation of four design principles. These design principles underlie the emerging class of customer service systems that, we believe, will enable firms to better compete in an environment characterized by an increase in customer centricity and in customers’ ability to selfserve and dynamically assemble the components of solutions that fit their needs. In this environment, customers retain control over their transactional data, as well as the timing and mode of their interactions with firms, as they increasingly gravitate toward integrated complete customer solutions rather than single products or services. Guided by these design principles, we iterated through, and evaluated, two instantiations of the class of systems we propose, before outlining implications and directions for further cross-disciplinary scholarly research.

Disentangling the Strategic Use of Social Media in the Insurance Industry: A Value Co-Creation Perspective

Abstract Purpose Despite the fundamental role that digital social media could play in the process of consumer co-creation, academic research on this topic is still in its infancy. The overall aim of the chapter is to consider how digital social media can be used by firms to encourage and sustain co-creation behavior. Design/methodology/approach We draw a multiple case analyses, focusing on the insurance industry, particularly on the Italian insurance market. Findings We particularly extend the literature on value co-creation by proposing a composite framework that enables us to grasp the different strategies that firms implement in their different manners of employing digital social media. Practical implications We set forth a research agenda for managerial scholars that can help understand how social media should be incorporated in the day-to-day operations of insurance companies.

The Use of Web Services for Inclusive Decision Process: Towards the Enhancement of E-Democracy

This article focuses on the case study of the web sites of the Italian regional governments who have agreed to take part in the DE.CI.DI. project which aims put into practice e-democracy in provincial Public Administration. We have assessed the level of e-democracy developments based on four different dimensions: transparency and interactivity. We conclude that the spreading use of Internet has raised expectations that it may be used to encourage a more direct citizen engagement and modify the ways in which public decisions are taken, however those expectations have not been fully met yet.

Value-Co-creation Through Multichannels Distributions: The Nike ID Case

Information Technology (IT) development, in recent years, deeply changed the relationship between firm and customer, leading to an important shift in their respective roles. Nowadays, the customer has to be seen as a key player of this relationship, carrying out an active and important contribution in the phase of product development. Despite a growing interest for this topic, the importance of how and why some specific organizations seem to be more effective at executing channel interactions and co-creating value with customers remains underspecified. To address this gap, we try to explain, through a case analysis, the multi-channel strategy that Nike developed with the so called “ID service” in the Italian market scenario and how its basic principles can be a foundation to generate value over time through customer collaboration. In particular, this study explores the role of IT-enabled value co-creation in this domain.

Analysing the Intellectual Structure of E-Service Research

Despite the importance that e-service is gaining among firms and public administrations, academic research on this topic is still in its infancy (Santos, 2003), and relatively little work has been carried out. Although prior analyses have examined the rise and fall of specific theories or research topics within the e-service research field (Rust & Lemon, 2001; Rust & Kannan, 2002; Javalgi et al., 2004; Scupola et al., 2009), they have rarely focused on fundamental questions such as: what types of articles have been influential in e-service research? Does the e-service research field have different subfields, and what is the relationship, if any, among them? The purpose of this study is to answer the above-mentioned questions by using a bibliometric approach. The analysis, by identifying relevant concepts and theories that have emerged in the field of e-service, may help interested researchers identify how they can contribute to the field of e-service – by adding and enriching emerging groups or acting as bridges across groups.

Social media communication strategies

Purpose While a great amount of literature has focused on the relationship between communication strategies and corporate reputation, there is no systematic research on the different kinds of social media communication strategies. Based on the corporate reputation and social media literature, this paper aims to contribute to this gap in the research in two main ways. First identifying which social media communication strategy is more effective with contrasting levels of reputations; second, analyzing the differences between high- and low-reputation companies with respect to their ability to use corporate communication. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a longitudinal explorative multiple-case study and theoretical sampling. The research setting is the Italian insurance context. The focus of this analysis on one medium, Facebook, because it is the most exploited in the context of the Italian insurance sector. Findings Six complementary social media communication strategies were identified: egocentric, conversational, selective, openness, secretive and supportive. The results also reveal distinct ways in which high-, medium- and low-reputation companies’ utilize the six complementary strategies of communications. Research limitations/implications The study is based on a single industry and on one single geographical market, and care should thus be taken in generalizing the findings to other contexts. Therefore emerges the opportunity to broaden this research to other similar service sector, such as banking, to assess and generalize the results obtained. In addition, a possible direction of research, especially from a methodological standpoint, should investigate companies from different countries. Such a comparative study would examine in depth whether and to what extent the institutional framework may impact on communication strategies implemented by companies. This study only analyzed one social media (Facebook); hence, we cannot draw firm conclusions about what may constitute a successful social media communication strategy. Practical implications From this study, managers can learn how to combine the six communication strategies to have an effective impact on the corporate reputation. They can also learn how the number of interactions and the time taken to respond to questions from customers improve the corporate reputation and provide communication that is more effective. Originality/value This research extends the previous literature on corporate reputation and corporate communication, showing the relationship between them in a social media context and providing different strategies of managing this combination.

Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Communities Design: a Cross Case Analysis

While a great amount of literature has focused on the effects of open innovation and crowdsourcing strategy on firms’ competition and generation of ideas, we know little about how to design an IT artifact to manage the supporting of creativity among on line communities. Defining an interpretative framework which is based on the Design Theory concept, this paper aims to contribute to this body of knowledge by means of a cross-case study, focused on the design evaluation of two crowdsourcing-supporting IT platforms. We develop a theoretical framework for crowdsourcing communities, aimed to identify how the design characteristics shape the competition to generate new ideas, thereby influencing the crowdsourcing strategy.

Combining Exploitation and Exploration Through Crowdsourcing: The Case of Starbucks

In this paper, we explore the concept of crowdsourcing as a driver of the ambidexterity innovations capabilities and as a strategic tool to combine exploitation and exploration strategies in the innovation generation process. In doing so, we focus on the case of Starbucks Corporation, an international coffee and coffeehouse chain considered the largest coffeehouse company in the world.

Public Participation in Environmental Decision-Making: The Case of PPGIS

The Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) offers a special and potentially important means to facilitate public participation in the planning and decision making. The major problem is the lack of evaluation methods to verify the outcome of the effects of PPGIS on decision making processes. To fill this gap, the objective of the on-going research is to develop an analytical framework through which PPGIS initiatives can be evaluated.

The Cross-Level Antecedents of Dynamic Capabilities Development: The Case of Network Exploitation Capability

This study will conceptualize antecedents of dynamic capabilities at the individual and organizational level. My focus is on network exploitation capability, defined as the ability of an organization to effectively “orchestrate” the combination of traditional and technology-enabled distribution channels for its product or service. My analysis has allowed me to reach four main results: (1) to distinguish individual antecedents from the organizational ones; (2) to list the individual and organizational antecedents in terms of sensing, seizing and reconfiguring; (3) to underscore the existing relationship between individual and organizational antecedents; to provide a small theoretical contribution to the literature concerning dynamic capabilities1.