This Handbook brings together 49 international specialists to address an issue of increasing importance for the world’s post-industrial economies; innovation as it relates to services.

This paper examines the relationship among the complexity of customer needs, customer centricity, innovativeness, service differentiation, and business performance within the context of companies that have made a service transition from pure goods providers to service providers. A survey of 332...

The sun, sea and sand model that has characterized the Spanish tourism sector and has caused Spain's tourist sector to become a world-class industry is actually undergoing drastic changes. This model is based on the existence of major tourism destinations characterized by high levels of industry...

In this study, we present, based on econometric choice modeling framework, how manufacturing managers/executives trade-off between cost, delivery, flexibility, and service features in the supplier selection process for commodity raw materials, given acceptable quality. Empirical data for this...

Customers select suppliers based on the relative importance of different attributes such as quality, price, flexibility, and delivery performance. This study examines the difference between managers' rating of the perceived importance of different supplier attributes and their actual choice of...

Conjoint analysis has played an important role in helping make a number of operations management decisions including product and service design, supplier selection, and service operations capacity. Many recent advances in this area have raised questions about the most appropriate form of...

Although brands are acknowledged as significant assets in a firm's value creation and differentiation process, branding literature often describes opposing perspectives and contradictory demands. This article develops a framework of three strategic brand management archetypes that provide new...

When we visit a retail outlet, we go there to complete some type of shopping goal. These goals may be very specific and precisely planned prior to entering the store, or more abstract, and something we think of on the spur of the moment. The stores may display tens of thousands of different...

This commentary is about the article, "Satisfaction with Service Recovery: Perceived Justice and Emotional Responses" (Rio-Lanza, Vázquez-Casielles, and Diaz-Martin, this issue). Never before have so many services been bought, sold, and consumed as they are today. Competition today is fierce....