Success in business markets demands going beyond satisfactory exchanges with customers. Conventional wisdom therefore dictates that firms must build close customer relationships. Yet, unfortunately, the meaning of a close relationship from the customer's viewpoint can get lost in translation. We...

Security of corporate assets has become a major concern for many companies. The protection of tangible assets costs US companies nearly $30 billion a year. But is the true value of these companies being protected? Intangible assets are integral to the value of a company, yet little is done to...

This article formally defines the construct of esprit de corps and develops propositions which explain how it emerges in individuals and impacts on individual and group level behavior. Building from social exchange theory and Jones and James (1979) framework, we propose the premise that an...

Service science is an emerging discipline concerned with the evolution, interaction, and reciprocal cocreation of value among service systems (Maglio and Spohrer [Maglio, P. P., J. Spohrer. 2008. Fundamentals of Service Science. <i>Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science</i> <b>36</b>(1) 18-20.]; Spohrer...

Summary The creation of value is the core purpose and central process of economic exchange. Traditional models of value creation focus on the firm's output and price. We present an alternative perspective, one representing the intersection of two growing streams of thought, service science and...

This article explores a service-dominant (S-D) logic, service-ecosystems approach to studying value cocreation and the (re)formation of service systems. We outline the central premises of S-D logic and elaborate the concept of a service ecosystem to propose a framework that focuses on resource...