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This article investigates how service companies might engage frontline employees in transforming a market vision into a new service routine. This is a major challenge given the separation between those making decisions at the managerial level and those interacting with customers, ultimately enabling the service experience. Through interviews and observations, we capture the mechanisms and practices that emerged in an in-depth case study of a radical service innovation anchored in a new market vision. Our findings show that frontline employee engagement in the innovation process has to be triggered by managers, thereafter unfolding naturally in cycles of proactive behaviour and experimentation. The emerging routinisation process allows transitioning from the definition of a new vision to new routines through guiding and building on employees' experience and proactive behaviour, institutionalising the new practices that ultimately lead to radical service innovation. This study contributes to the service innovation literature by merging two very different sources of knowledge, namely vague, intangible, and radically new visions, and practical and tacit frontline employee experiences usually associated with incremental innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The innovation of meaning paradigm is a strategy to radically innovate product and service meanings. While researchers have focussed on the role of product and retail space meanings as interlinked in the pursuit of innovation, no investigation has been directed towards understanding when the two meanings differ. This research explores how companies can manage two different meanings offered through their retail services and the products sold. Design/methodology/approach: Due to the highly intangible and subjective nature of meaning, as well as the exploratory aim of the research, a case study approach has been adopted. In particular, the research compares two case studies of similar companies in the beauty industry. Data were triangulated across three different sources: a panel of experts, ethnographic research in the two companies' stores and extensive academic and practitioner publications. Findings: Findings suggest that innovating the service meaning can be a viable strategy to differentiate a retail offering the product meaning which is no longer perceived as different with respect to competitors. Originality/value: The study applies the innovation of meaning concept to retail services, distinguishing the meaning given to the store from that given to products, thereby offering managers a strategy to innovate a suffering retail format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview: Online-based retailers have made competing in the physical retail industry increasingly challenging. Building strong experiences to differentiate from the online-based players is key to survival. Brands can leverage different forms of engagement, such as sensorial or cognitive ones, to support their customer experience. "Read, Eat, Dream" (RED), a new concept by LaFeltrinelli, the major Italian bookseller, is an example of how to create an "omni-experience" by leveraging customers' lifestyles. This article outlines how LaFeltrinelli conceptualized and implemented the RED concept and presents four key design elements central to creating an omni-experience. By creating an omni-experience, retailers can transform from fulfillment centers to spaces where customers can engage, which in turn increases the length of their visit and occasions for purchase. An omni-experience also establishes the retail store as a reference point for some customers' specific activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Emilio Bellini, Corrado Lo Storto This paper, using qualitative and quantitative data relative to the software process improvement initiative in which the Italian branch of a multinational software company was engaged from January 1997 to May 2001, investigates the impact of Capability Maturity Model (CMM) certification on organisational learning. A knowledge management perspective is adopted to explain the software development process increase in productivity. Data suggest that CMM can effectively support and address knowledge management and learning within a software organisation. Disciplined methods and practices are expected to result in better control over the software development process, and organisations using a well-structured process model such as the CMM can use the process infrastructure it provides for organisational learning.

This paper builds upon the knowledge-based view and organizational learning perspective. It develops and empirically tests a conceptual model to analyse the drivers and benefits of university–industry cooperation from the firm perspective. We used structural equation modeling to examine data collected from a sample of small and medium-sized Italian firms in the information and communication technology sector. We found that past collaborative experience increases the benefits drawn from university–industry cooperation. Both collaborative know-how and trust, however, play a significant mediating role on the relationship between collaborative experience and benefits. In particular, collaborative know-how is the main factor enhancing intangible benefits, such as knowledge transfer and learning, while trust is the main driver of tangible benefits, such as product and process innovations. Taken together, these findings suggest that firms should develop strategic competences to fully benefit from collaborations with universities because past collaborative experience alone is not sufficient. From the policy point of view, effort is needed to build channels and tools enhancing trust between industry and university, especially to support small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its continued observational successes, there is a persistent (and growing) interest in extending cosmology beyond the standard model, Λ CDM . This is motivated by a range of apparently serious theoretical issues, involving such questions as the cosmological constant problem, the particle nature of dark matter, the validity of general relativity on large scales, the existence of anomalies in the CMB and on small scales, and the predictivity and testability of the inflationary paradigm. In this paper, we summarize the current status of Λ CDM as a physical theory, and review investigations into possible alternatives along a number of different lines, with a particular focus on highlighting the most promising directions. While the fundamental problems are proving reluctant to yield, the study of alternative cosmologies has led to considerable progress, with much more to come if hopes about forthcoming high-precision observations and new theoretical ideas are fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]