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Cities provide a privileged context for observing environmental, social, political, and economic changes. They offer great opportunities for experimentation, often becoming laboratories for innovative practices in different fields of research. This article describes how Service Design can concretely contribute to promoting sustainable and inclusive services at the city level by adopting participatory, collaborative, and multi-stakeholder processes. In particular, the article analyses, through a literature review, the evolution of service design applied to complex and large-scale systems, identifying in the recent conceptualization of service ecosystem design the framework for designing sustainable and inclusive solutions in urban contexts. Two design studios were developed through a collaborative design process to link theory and practice. Three examples of service concepts are described as experiments in transformative service design practices that incorporate systems thinking. The article explains how service designers can deal with complex and large-scale transformations in terms of sustainable urban services and outlines a service design process and some design and research implications related to the ability to adapt to uncertainty and incorporate complexity as design elements.

The sharing economy, based on collaboration, sharing, and innovation, has brought about a disruptive revolution in the transformation of the economy and provided a new operating mechanism for promoting sustainable consumption. Therefore, exploring which signals in the sharing economy can effectively stimulate customer consumption behaviors is of great significance. The research uses the signal-interpretation-response (I-I-R) model to build a research framework for customer sustainable consumption behaviors in the context of the sharing economy. With the help of web crawler technology, we captured customer online review data on Airbnb, the sharing accommodation platform, to study the driving path to interpret how multiple signals from different sources influence sustainable consumption behaviors. Regression research shows that the scores in the customer signal, the sustainable services provided in the service provider signal, the super-host certification in the platform signal, and the interactive effects of the three signals have a significant positive impact on customer sustainable consumption behaviors. Consequently, the increase of customer sustainable consumption behaviors improves sales performance. Furthermore, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) found five configurations for customer sustainable consumption behaviors based on different property types. The research results provide a reference for strengthening customer sustainable consumption behaviors and improving the service quality of platforms and service providers.

The growing demand for hospital services and the pressure to incorporate sustainable strategies into hospital management have led hospitals to rethink their business model and seek new ways to manage their operations. Corporate sustainability is an important way to make hospitals more sustainable and competitive. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that contains the drivers for the management of sustainability in hospitals (SH), developed through the content analysis method. As a result, this study proposes five drivers: toward the circular economy; making sustainable buildings; adopting knowledge management and organizational culture; employing management systems, tools, and methods; and applying technological innovations. This framework contributes in a managerial way to helping managers of hospitals in managing sustainability; making their businesses fairer, greener, and more prosperous; and fulfilling their commitments to the well-being of their employees and society, providing a basis for moving toward the premises of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda. This study also scientifically contributes to the academic maturation of the topic by systematizing elements and adding insights to the state of the art on SH. It is recommended that future studies add new elements to the drivers or even propose new drivers for the continuous scientific advancement of this topic.

Service quality perceived by clients should be a crucial element in the process of co-creating sustainable services. This article aimed to examine relationships between five constructs: the usefulness of courier services, the ease of use of courier services, the trust in courier services, the service quality, and the future intention to use courier services. This research focuses on courier services. An electronic questionnaire was used to conduct confidential interviews. It was distributed between January and March 2019. The number of questionnaires returned by courier service customers amounted to 1073. The authors used generalized least squares (GLS) of structural equation modelling (GLS-SEM) to verify the hypotheses. The obtained results confirmed statistically significant relationships between the variables of the ease of use and the trust in service, the usefulness and the trust in service, the trust in service and the service quality and finally, the service quality and the future intention to use the services. The obtained results confirmed an important role of technological aspects in courier service quality, which will become the main determinant of the development of this sector in the future. The authors proposed a new approach to the definition of trust in service. Apart from the interpersonal trust, they shed more light on the trust in the supplier, i.e., the trust in the used technologies.

To gain competitive advantages and sustainable service innovation, hotels are considering artificial intelligence technologies (AI), including robots, kiosks for service automation and chatbots. However, due to the change of the service process and unfamiliar communication interface, hotel customers may have difficulties in adopting the new change. In this paper, we tried to find out if the failure of AI-based services would affect customers&rsquo, perception. For this, we designed the experiment by separating AI (i.e., chatbot) services and self-service technology (SST, i.e., pad) services and service failures and successful cases, respectively. As a result, SST showed more positive perceptions and revisit intention in the successful service situation. The service failure situation showed no differences between chatbot and SST. In addition, novelty and the need for interaction characteristics of customers showed significant differences between groups in terms of service success and failure, respectively. Additionally, we explored negative word-of-mouth (WOM) to learn further effects by service failures and successes.

Public administrations are organizations whose mission is to serve the interests of society by providing efficient and sustainable services. Much of the information received from public administrations uses social media due to their versatility and capacity to reach a large number of citizens. Among them, Twitter is the most widely used, especially to disseminate messages with a high social content. This type of messages falls within the discipline of social marketing. However, when public administrations use Twitter for social marketing communication, it is not known which factors are the most decisive to achieve the social objective for which they are issued. This article provides an answer to this question, using the Analytic Network Process Multicriteria method to determine which factors matter and how they are interrelated when issuing social marketing messages through Twitter. The result of this research reveals that from the 22 factors analyzed, the most influential from a social marketing point of view are the average age of population, the existence of a strategic communication plan, the number of tweets and the average number of tweets per day, the number of followers, retweets and mentions, as well as the efficiency of the account.

The socioeconomic sphere and the relationships in which commitment occurs are important elements in the development of sustainable services. The study reported in this article identifies the elements that influence the development of the relationship between service providers and their customers and proposes a model that describes the state of the relationship between service providers and customers in terms of symmetrical commitment of both parties. Qualitative research including interviews with experts and case studies was completed, resulting in a ‘ladder of commitment’ model that identifies distinct commitment levels and specific commitment factors functioning at each of those levels. In practice, the proposed model makes it possible to assess the state of customer and provider commitment, identifying commitment deficits on the part of the customer or service provider. This article can provide practical added value for managers who are looking for ways to analyze customer commitment in order to develop sustainable services.

Sustainable tourism management is becoming an increasingly important factor in the image of tourist destinations. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider the possibility of charging a premium price on certain tourism products or services in exchange for making them more sustainable. Generally, eco-friendly management of cultural heritage sites, and particularly World Heritage sites, along with protected natural areas, is essential for the image enhancement of tourist destinations. In line with these considerations, this paper aims to quantify the willingness to pay (WTP) an extra amount in order for certain tourism products and services to become more sustainable in a World Heritage city such as Caceres, Spain. By using the contingent valuation method, the average price increase that tourists visiting the city would be willing to pay for a double room in a hotel, a restaurant, entrance to a museum, or a taxi ride, all of which would become more sustainable services, has been estimated. In addition to the aggregate analysis, diverse average-comparison statistical techniques have been used in order to determine the possible influence of sociodemographic factors on the WTP for more sustainable products and services. Specifically, factors including the effect resulting from a tourist&rsquo, s place of origin, gender, the year when the survey was conducted (through t-tests), and the effect of age and educational levels (through ANOVA tests) on the WTP for sustainability, have been analyzed. When considering all of the sociodemographic factors involved, notable statistical differences have been found. This implies that when a hypothetical increase in tourism prices for the purpose of financing public or private sustainability actions is considered, different segments of the tourism market should be taken into account, since it would not be appropriate to apply the same policy of price increases to all tourists equally.

Sustainable services are often regarded as sustainable strategies and operations producing goods and services that satisfy customer needs and significantly improve social and environmental performance. To be sustainable, service providers must satisfy consumers’ needs or otherwise they will become redundant and economically irrelevant. This paper presents the results of an empirical study on the determinants of customer satisfaction and loyalty in life-insurance services in Vietnam based on a database collected through a questionnaire survey of 1476 customers during 2017. A path analysis technique is applied to test the proposed framework on the direct and indirect relationship between variables. The results of statistical analysis indicate that customer satisfaction in life-insurance services is significantly explained by such factors as corporate image, service quality and perceived value. Our findings suggest that a life-insurance service provider should focus on enhancing service quality and corporate image in order to obtain customer satisfaction that leads to customer loyalty.

If in the past, the success of innovation was measured primarily in the economic sphere, recently the non-economic sphere has increasingly become more of a matter of corporate management and, therefore, of innovation management. Management’s acquisition of non-economic aspects has been strongly influenced by the vision of sustainable development. Sustainability is a direction of action important for innovation as well, integrating economic, social, and environmental responsibility in the management of innovation, leading to sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI). Research on SOI approached innovation processes has been carried out in large companies, however in recent years the use of TRIZ (teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadach) tools has been tried for SOI. The TRIZ-based approach is a valuable tool because it does not require an encyclopedic knowledge of field-specific technology and it enables the expansion of the scope of problem solutions beyond the skills of the team members. This paper discusses the concepts of sustainability, innovation, and risk management in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for the purpose of developing a flow chart for the implementation of the TRIZ method in SMEs and for evaluating the state of innovation in such companies. Through the use of the TRIZ method in the field of SMEs, fast and efficient processes, products, and sustainable services have been obtained.