Cristina Mele

• PhD
• Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II at University of Naples Federico II

[Modified excerpt] Systems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about every system in nature, in society and in many scientific domains as well as a framework with which we can investigate phenomena from a holistic approach. Systems thinking comes from the shift in attention from the part to the whole, considering the observed reality as an integr...

This chapter explores the transformative impact of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on service ecosystems, emphasising their role in fostering novel forms of resource exchange and value co-creation. It delves into the concept of phygital materiality—the seamless integration of physical and digital elements—that NFTs epitomise. Key contributions of the ch...

While customer journey (CJ) research proliferates, prior studies have adopted different CJ conceptualisations, theoretical perspectives, and methods, fostering fragmentation in CJ research. Addressing this literature-based tension or gap, we systematically map the corpus of CJ literature to uncover its intellectual structure, reducing the rising fr...

Purpose The process of introducing a new robotic technology into a service system is complex, and its impacts on work practices can be challenging. By adopting a system perspective, this study investigates how human–robot collaboration (HRC) transforms work practices (i.e. customer care). Design/methodology/approach We conducted a two-year longitu...

Purpose This study aims to investigate the evolving concept of the metaverse and its implications for service innovation. It seeks to understand how integrating technologies such as extended reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence and non-fungible tokens enables companies to experiment and innovate. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a qual...

Purpose The study aims to delve into the “phygital customer journey” (PCJ), which merges physical and digital interactions in customer experiences, using a practice-based lens to reveal the underlying dynamics of these blended encounters. Design/methodology/approach Feedback from 60 individuals established the groundwork for a qualitative analysis...

Purpose In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitiv...

Purpose Service research offering a view of both the dark and bright sides of smart technology remains scarce. This paper embraces a critical perspective and examines the conflicting outcomes of smart services on the customer experience (CX), with a specific focus on chatbots. Design/methodology/approach This study uses empirical research methods...

The label “phygital” (physical plus digital) has been proposed to describe how companies try to engage customers due to the exploitation of smart technologies. Although used mainly by practitioners, research into phygital’s theoretical development is lacking. We conduct a systematic literature review to obtain an overall vision of the phenomenon an...

We aim to explain service ecosystem change at the intersection of focal service ecosystems through the concepts of boundary and boundary work. We define a service ecosystem boundary as a set of symbolic or social boundaries that enable the functioning of an ecosystem by identifying and authorizing actors and recognizing, legitimizing, and protectin...

In the last fifteen years, scholars have challenged the neoclassical definition of the market. The debate is not closed. The plurality of definitions suggests a need for an understanding of the different approaches that are emerging, and their degrees of development. The research method is based on a series of bibliometric analyses; mainly, the co-...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to manage complex relations within the healthcare ecosystem. The role of new technologies in achieving this goal is a topic of current interest. Among them, blockchain technology is experiencing widespread application in the healthcare context. The present work investigates how this technology fosters valu...

Research methodology is a set of procedures that scholars follow to address their studies and ensure valid and reliable results. Choosing a suitable methodological approach is essential for the research process and represents one of the most challenging decisions for scholars. Case studies research assumes a key role in the debate between qualitati...

Purpose This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and new technologies. The study adopts the blockchain technology (BcT) context to elicit novel technology-enhanced market practices. Design/methodology/approach The a...

Purpose COVID-19 has dramatically changed how people live, socialise and think about their future. The disruptive shock that hit societies all over the world had a significantly negative impact on businesses, creating not only economic discontinuity but also uncertainty and disorientation. This special issue on COVID-19 aims to phrase the pandemic...

Purpose The COVID-19 wave spread all over the global market, affecting all industries. This paper aims to develop the understanding of how service systems can enhance their viability when facing rapid systemic changes. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from Reddit, and particularly the subreddit r/coronavirus, to identify posts that...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the change of institutional logics in actors’ practices within crowdfunding platforms, seen as open collaborative ecosystems. Design/methodology/approach The research follows an abductive approach, wherein data collection and analysis, and the search for complementary theories, constitute parallel iterative proce...

This article presents and illustrates a novel value-based well-being framework, derived from service-dominant logic notions of the link between value and well-being. Based in a wide range of disciplines, this framework links well-being to four value outcomes: use, option, existence, and bequest value. Such value outcomes stem from the interaction o...

Purpose Prior research acknowledges the lack of theorizing of markets within marketing. This paper aims to capture the emerging themes linked to different conceptualizations of the market and provide a language system for theorizing the market. Design/methodology/approach The paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of 177 articles and 22 keywords a...

Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pages With 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and...

Purpose How to improve healthcare for the ageing population is attracting academia attention. Emerging technologies (i.e. robots and intelligent agents) look relevant. This paper aims to analyze the role of cognitive assistants as boundary objects in value co-creation practices. We include the perceptions of the main actors – patients, (in)formal c...

Purpose This paper aims to focus on how companies shape the architecture of a phygital customer journey through the exploitation of smart technologies. Design/methodology/approach The research adopts a qualitative method using a grounded theory approach involving leading players in digital customer solutions and service providers from different in...

Purpose Some population groups face precarious health, reflecting their vulnerability, in terms of lack of agency or control. Smart technologies promise to transform people's lives from the enhanced connectedness, greater computational processing and more complex decision-making they can achieve. This study aims to investigate how smart technology...

Digital transformation attracted scholars’ attention in various scientific domains, as business models, strategies, human resources management, and, more in general, social sciences. Additionally, digital transformation drove changes in both businesses and society as a whole. Due to its relevance in recent studies and daily activities, we observed...

Purpose The wider possibility of connectivity offers additional opportunities for customers to experience value propositions. The online world is only one side of the customer experience. The integration of digital technologies, social presence and physical elements increases the complexity of customer journey. This paper aims to map the phygital c...

Purpose The coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a tremendous impact on companies worldwide. However, researchers have no clear idea of the key issues requiring their attention. This paper aims to close this gap by analysing all business-related posts on a coronavirus subreddit (“r/coronavirus”) and identifying the main research streams that are guiding...

The paper examines Dieselgate by focusing on the role of actors in performing in and shaping the market, as a macromarketing issue. The focus on the automotive market system is due to the need to “make space for concern” and to become reflexive about the emergent dark side of its practices. To account for the practices of actors, a discourse analys...

People make decisions and take actions to improve their viability everyday, and they increasingly turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with their decision making. Such trends suggest the need to determine how AI and other cognitive technologies affect value co-creation. An integrative framework, based on the service-dominant logic and nud...

Purpose Loneliness and isolation are on the rise, globally threatening the well-being across age groups; global social distancing measures during the COVID-19 crisis have intensified this so-called “loneliness virus”. The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative framework and research agenda on the role of companion robots in mitigating f...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to offer a comprehensive understanding of social business innovation by addressing both its conceptualisation and its process. Design/Methodology/Approach Because this multifaceted and complex field is still emerging, we chose to adopt a qualitative research approach. We set out to explore cases in which social an...

Companies innovate the value proposition by integrating social and business issues to balance value across multiple actors, thus ensuring the creation of socialbusiness value. Social-business innovation requires that multiple actors come together to align perceptions and expectations and create shared meaning for the development and diffusion of in...

Purpose Over recent years, few industries have seen such dramatic changes as the healthcare industry. The potential connectivity of digital technologies is completely transforming the healthcare ecosystem. This has resulted in companies increasingly investing in digital transformations to exploit data across channels, operations and patient outreac...

The main contribution of the work lies in framing the role of University as an innomediary enacting the shaping of a start-up ecosystem. We observe two main groups of practices in our study

Understanding innovating in practice requires in-depth analyses of how actors interact, work, learn, and discover new ways to do things, to serve others and co-create value. From this perspective, innovating entails complex, uncertain, collective, iterative knowledge activities in interconnected contexts. Furthermore, learning dynamics assume a par...

This article goes in-depth in the conceptual analysis of knowledge and learning as social cultural phenomena. We focus on studying three practice-based learning approaches we named - “knowing-in practice”, “knowing-in-between practices” and “cultural-historical activity theory”- through their key concepts. More specifically we are interested in how...

This article focuses on the value innovation prompted by Artificial Intelligence (AI). By shifting the attention from innovation as a new outcome to innovating as something that people do (i.e., a practice) to co-create value, this article addresses how IBM Watson prompts new service provisions and the emergence of new interactions between humans a...

This article advances a conceptualization of service innovation as socially constructed through resource integration and sensemaking. By developing this view, the current study goes beyond an outcome perspective, to include the collective nature of service innovation and the role of the social context in affecting the service innovation process. Ac...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of context in service innovation by developing a conceptual framework that illuminates the key elements and trends in context change. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a service ecosystem lens for understanding how elements and trends in context foster service innovation. A conc...

Purpose The extant service ecosystem literature rarely addresses the dark side of actors’ agency, which hinders further development of the service-dominant (S-D) logic, particularly with regard to understanding service ecosystem dynamics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to delineate the dark-side facets of actors’ agency that adversely aff...

The present chapter builds on performativity research and investigates the performative role of value propositions in shaping a service ecosystem. Performativity is used as a central concept in illustrating how actors influence reality through their representations and their practices. In the investigation, Benefit corporations (hereafter B-corpora...

This chapter examines how practice-based learning perspectives allow to approach the broad, service-based view of innovation and its processes as a collaborative learning process of creating something new in a better way. We focus on studying three practice-based learning approaches through their key concepts. More specifically, we are interested i...

This chapter aims to start a debate about the underlying assumptions of innovation schools (research traditions) in which various frameworks and models have been developed. By identifying the social science research dimensions in innovation studies, we highlight three schools of innovation thought: (1) linear and planned, (2) iterative and interact...

Service innovation has often been conceptualized as a linear multistage development process within a main innovator system. In this logic, innovation is communicated through certain channels over time, and adopters play a key role in the process of innovation diffusion. This study moves away from this conceptualization and proposes service innovati...

This chapter focuses on the social ways of doing business innovation in actual conditions of complexity. By applying the concept of practical accomplishment, innovating is seen as “a texture of practices,” that is, a set of practices resting on other practices. We use the metaphor of texture to develop a fresh conceptualization of innovating. A tex...

Innovation is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary research disciplines.

With the increased prevalence of ecosystems across sectors, understanding what conditions enable their formation is important for both researchers and managers. Service-dominant logic (S-D logic) focuses on service ecosystems, in which actors are interdependent, and characterizes them as layered and nested within three levels (micro, meso, and macr...

This work builds on a practice-based approach to offer a fresh understanding of innovation. The authors address innovation not simply as an outcome but as something actors do: a practice in terms of a collective doing that connects knowledgeable actors. The term ‘innovating’, rather than ‘innovation’, reflects the dynamic aspect of the phenomenon....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss how service, as an interdisciplinary area of research, can increase its potential for transdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of what signifies intra-, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research. Design/methodology/approach – The essay first discusses common perspectives on the ser...

The purpose of our study is to analyse individual service culture and value experiences of everyday services. Specifically, we understand service culture as the collective cultural dimension of individual service experiences. We focus on regional service cultures in Northern and Southern Europe and draw on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in order to...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine eco-innovation practices within project networks. Eco-innovation practices involve systematic series of actions that integrate resources to create value. Design/methodology/approach – Using case research, the authors conducted an intensive study of innovation practices within project networks, usin...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer a fresh framing of innovation, as service innovation/value innovation. Design/methodology/approach – By examining the visions, patterns and outcomes of three different research approaches to understanding innovation – goods-dominant (G-D) logic, the resource-based approach and service-dominant (S-D)...

Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to mult...

Mainstream marketing’s view on markets builds on neoclassical economics. By integrating mainstream marketing thinking with the emergent marketing literature that acknowledges a set of shortcomings related to the neoclassical-based market conceptualization, this paper aims to provide a market conceptualization that captures complexity. Grounded on t...

Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to mult...

In this paper the authors apply a meta-theory analysis to compare two theoretical approaches: the resource-based view (RBV) and service-dominant logic (S-D logic). The comparison is based on three aspects: 1. a general profile; 2. the role of resources; 3. the conceptualisation of value. The authors give insights to a deeper understanding of the tw...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to frame innovation as a process of co‐creation according to a practice‐based view. Design/methodology/approach The paper focuses on the innovation practices that occurred within the web contexts of ten companies. In accordance with netnography research, data include preliminary studies of the web‐based context...

Management and marketing research in service is at a turning point, and service research is increasingly challenging existing marketing myths and questioning the validity of traditional approaches. In this mainframe, service-dominant (S-D) logic and service science, along with many-to-many marketing and the viable systems approach, have captured th...

The 2009 Naples Forum on Service was quite an experience for us. It overwhelmed us. It was a new concept, a desire to focus on certain themes which we experienced as the future for service research. But launching a new conference is a gamble. Our target was modest: 60 participants – and then we got 240 abstracts!What to do? The venue, Anacapri and...

The present study aims to (i) extend knowledge of the nature of conflicts and of their influence on value co-creation in project networks and (ii) contribute to the management of conflicts to enable value co-creation.This work is based on an action research methodology conducted during a five-year case study of a firm operating in the Information a...

This work explores the potential for utilising the service-dominant (S-D) logic of Vargo and Lusch (2004, 2006, 2008a, 2008c) as a framework for innovation processes from a network perspective. The work presents a conceptual framework for the subsequent empirical study of this issue by undertaking a literature review of S-D logic; value co-creation...

The aim of this chapter is to identify the key dimensions of service systems and to describe how they interact in the process of value co-creation. The four key dimensions identified in the analysis are: customers; people (including employees and other stakeholders); information; and technology. The chapter also characterises the value-creation pro...