Francesco Polese

Università degli Studi di Salerno | UNISA · Department of Business Studies and Research DISTRA

Covid-19 has restrained the managerial and innovative capacities of startuppers, forcing them to downsize their businesses or close them down altogether. Most resilient startups only, those able to manage changes, have been able to endure. The present study aims to understand how startup founders make their decisions in adverse contexts, such as th...

The data explained in the relevant report “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Transforming Food Systems for Affordable Healthy” (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, Rome 2020) reveals that the world is not on track to achieve the SDG 2.1 (“Universal access to safe and nutritious food”) and SDG 2.2 (“End of all forms of malnutrition”...

The study aims at exploring the influence of global coronavirus pandemic on teaching, learning and evaluation processes involved in Higher Education (HE) by analysing the way in which knowledge exchange is reframed through ICTs and technology. Through the interpretative lens of Service Dominant logic, the chapter rereads HE as an ecosystem and inve...

This chapter aims to explore the actor-for-actor (A4A) logic supporting recent changes occurred within higher education institutions (HE), in light of the changes brought about by the recent digital revolution underway, partly accelerated by the recent Pandemic of COVID-19. The work starts from an analysis of recent advances in the literature on th...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to understand if service innovation (Helkkula et al. , 2018), based on artificial intelligence (AI) systems, may guarantee healthcare service ecosystem (H-SES) well-being (Frow et al. , 2019; Beirão et al. , 2017), taking into account that many doubts relieved in terms of transparency may compromise the patients' pe...

Many core marketing concepts (e.g., markets, relationships, customer experience, brand meaning, value) concern phenomena that are difficult to understand using linear and dyadic approaches, because they are emergent. That is, they arise, often unpredictably, from interactions within complex and dynamic contexts. This paper contributes to the market...

Purpose Covid-19 pandemic impacted the tourism industry worldwide. Especially in catering, where restaurateurs have had to reinvent their business models, information and communication technologies (ICTs) play a fundamental role in supporting these changes, transforming barriers into opportunities. The purpose of this study is to investigate how re...

Artificial Intelligence-based Decision Support Systems (AI-based DSS) are becoming increasingly important in many contexts. This work aims to define a type of human-machine interactions for new value co-creation processes' ranks, to help identify factors that can stimulate value co-creation in human-machine interactions. To understand if the outcom...

The purpose of this paper is to understand if the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools may enable augmented decision-making for responsible actors (Spohrer, 2021) in healthcare. The biggest challenge for AI in healthcare is its own full applicability in daily clinical practices, due to fragmented data and their poor quality, further comp...

Purpose of the paper: The paper aims to investigate how academic and business actors co-create value when collaborating in digital research projects. Methodology: Qualitative research was conducted according to a social constructionism approach. Thirty participants comprising Italian university researchers and industry practitioners took part in th...

The study explores the remodelling of actors, interactions and relationships due to the different use of technologies that can enable contemporary organizations, conceptualized as service ecosystems, to comply with the posed by Covid-19. The aim is to investigate how the adoption of technology can lead to the readaptation of interactions between us...

Can public–private research favor sustainable economic growth? Can innovation in terms of predictive maintenance (a recently consolidated evolution compared to the more traditional final and preventive maintenance) favor sustainable business balance? Drawing on the Quadruple Helix model and adopting the users’ (fourth helix) perspective, this paper...

The Service Science lens favours a transdisciplinary approach to the study and interpretation of a huge number of phenomena. This article explores the applicability of this lens in understanding how resilience can emerge as a characteristic of the service systems at a city, or a district, region, or society level. This paper argues that by matching...

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to understand the strategic management of a technology-enabled shift from a product-centric to a service-centric logic and to identify the sociotechnical dynamics underlying this transition. The study focuses on how manufacturers manage to create value in industrial markets through digital servitization. Methodolog...

Service ecosystems provide a valuable perspective for exploring value co-creation, as they offer a relevant context to study dynamic resource integration processes. Although recent literature considers service ecosystem dynamics, little research concurrently addresses two key drivers of it: emergence and phase transitions. These two phenomena are o...

Purpose This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the identification and examination of the mechanisms (termed “viability mechanisms”) under which market-shaping activities yield the emergence of a viable market: one able to adapt to the changing environment over time while remaining stable enough for actors to benefit from it. De...

Corporate sustainability (CS) is receiving considerable attention from emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), playing an important role in the globalized market. However, theoretical and empirical knowledge about how EMNEs address CS is still scant, and the relationship between internationalization and CS has not been widely explored. T...

It has been recognized that a service systems perspective, informed by service-dominant logic, provides a dynamic approach for studying value co-creation. According to this view, value is the increase in the viability of the system in which actors co-create value. A construct from systems theory-emergence-can be of particular interest in contributi...

Obiettivi. Il capitolo ha l’obiettivo di presentare il contributo che gli studiosi dell’Approccio Sistemico Vitale (ASV) hanno fornito alla comunità scientifica internazionale della service research, nei suoi tre pillar quali la Service-Dominant logic, le teorie dei Sistemi e dei Network (nelle quali, naturalmente, l’ASV si inquadra), e la Service...

Purpose of the paper: The work aims to achieve a twofold objective: highlight, through a big data analysis, the consumers’ perception about sustainability in the footwear context and provide useful considerations regarding the opportunities for companies to adequately manage the decision-making process in order to maximize the benefits and minimize...

Obiettivi. Il lavoro ha per oggetto l analisi del ruolo dei Big Data nella ridefinizione delle decisioni di marketing attraverso la chiave di lettura offerta dal modello del Growth Hacking. Gli scopi principali dello studio sono: 1) esplorare l influenza degli analytics sulle decisioni di marketing; 2) esaminare come il modello del Growth Hacking p...

Grocery Retailing is facing many challenges and digital transformation is required for a market-driven space competition. The paper analyses the major trends of technology adoption in grocery retailing and integrates them in the wider framework of Industry 4.0. New networks and network economies derive, and new issues for management emerge.

In the last few years, service science has opened a debate on the need to adopt new approaches to better understand emerging social and economic dynamics. By following this direction, different multi- and transdisciplinary research pathways are requesting to consider an increasing number of new variables in the management of complex service systems...

Grocery retailing is facing many challenges and digital transformation in the current market-driven space competition. Grocery retailing renews itself based on Industry 4.0 technologies (typically related to manufacturing) and network economies, under a value co-creation perspective. The major trends of technology adoption in grocery retailing are...

Sustainability seems to be a hot topic today upon which a paradigmatic transformation is going on; this affects many fields and sectors by revealing the significant implications for actors’ participation, such as in healthcare. Today, healthcare calls for renewing and increasing its own main processes of hospitalization, as inspired by the current...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize Total Quality Management (TQM) in the light of service ecosystem view through the identification of dimensions underlying both the approaches and a clarification of the relationship between the two theories. Design/methodology/approach An overview on service ecosystems and on TQM is conduct...

Purpose - The topic of this paper is about Smart Service Systems (SSS), as recent evolution of service systems. The aim is to focus on the connection between structural/system traits of SSS and the value co-creation therein, and how the achievement of a co-creative experience is effectively supportive of the SSS viability.

Purpose- In current hypercompetitive markets, ICTs redefine business processes as a whole (Zhang et al., 2011; Phang and Kankanhalli, 2008) and contribute to reshape overall service experience. For this reason, a series of service theories have been introduced in the last two decades to take into account the impact of technology on value co-creatio...

This study aims at rereading public governance (PG) and public value management (PVM) in the light of viable systems approach (VSA). Starting from the common points and the dissimilarities between the two theories, an integrated framework for pinpointing the key drivers leading to the emersion of public value co-creation in a public system concepti...

In the service era, markets are reconceptualized as systems of actors interconnected through networked relationships based on resources exchange and producing value co-creation. Two of the main contemporary service research theories, Service-dominant logic and Service science, propose different organizational layouts for producing and harmonizing v...

According to a growing research community there is the awareness that successful service exchanges are at the base of positive interactions among socio-economic actors. Within this community value co-creation is among the most emerging research focus of many scholars addressing service exchange; nevertheless the concept, indeed intriguing by itself...

This book targets the critical issue of decision making in uncertain conditions and situations. The aim is to increase readers’ understanding of complexity and of socio-economic interactions through the application of systems thinking perspectives. Among the various areas and topics addressed are complexity and sustainable management, markets as co...

Most studies dedicated to students' behavior do not fully meet the need to identify the motivations leading students to choose the university. Therefore, the work provides empirical evidence aimed at highlighting the factors influencing the students’ behavior in the choice of their university. To this end, a big data analysis was carried out with R...

The definition of "complexity and governance"

This paper aims at introducing a new framework to interpret and/or exploit the dynamics among agents in "marketing-oriented management" (Gummesson and Polese, 2009) called A2A (Vargo and Lusch, 2016). By overcoming the traditional distinction between producers and consumers in the B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) classifica...

Innovation implies collaboration among business actors and is fundamental in value cocreation networks. A significant context is the healthcare, where Translational Medicine (T-MED) aims at decreasing barriers between clinical research and medical treatments. The Translational Medicine is the integration and optimization of inputs in basic research...

Purpose The paper aims to show the relevance of the interest in sharing the common purpose and in searching for a common survival in emerging of ecosystem (ES) as an entity that ‘is not’ but emerges by the viable actors interaction Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper contributes to the research by defining the ES building on the co...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of actors that allow them to relate to others actors in the system through shared intentionality (orientation) and the nature of the A4A relationship and the results that such interactions bring to the emergent system based on this shared purpose (finality). Design/methodology...

Purpose – In recent years, the academic world has seen the spread of a growing interest in understanding the dynamics characterizing studies conducted in different research areas. This trend seems to have taken hold also in the scientific community interested in issues related to Service Science Management Engineering and Design. In this regard, t...

This paper presents a conceptual model to allow communities self-detecting fake and inappropriate news on social network sites based on collective intelligence and inspired by Viable Systems Approach. The model is grounded on an extension of the Gruber model (on which Collective Knowlegde Systems are based) which incorporates a Consensus Method typ...

The turbulence of the current competitive environment emphasizes the importance of the role played by performance measurement systems in generating an improvement of business results. Starting from this consideration, the work pursues a twofold goal: firstly, it tries to verify the existence and the degree of a research interest about this topic; s...

Objectives: The challenging issue of value (co)creation has attracted a great number of researchers and decision makers to debates on ways to improve the capacity and will of actors to collaborate to produce better solutions and results. Some researchers have analysed value (co)creation as the result of the individual and collective will to collabo...

The vibrant scenario emerging, given recent social and economic trends, is launching new challenges to organizations, highlighting the need to increase their competitiveness by improving human resources capabilities and competences. Increasing complexity requires that managers and policy makers be endowed with new competences and capabilities to mo...

In contemporary dynamic markets, approaches to management based on systems theory have assumed increasing relevance, leading firms to valorise a holistic optic to challenge environmental changes. In particular, Viable Systems Approach (v S a) symbolizes the aforementioned holistic view of enterprises, introducing some innovative concepts that renov...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how service innovations (in a living lab context) contribute to co-create value in a service network. Exploratory research is developed using a qualitative approach and case study on mobility services in Bologna. Our findings reveal that the involved entities are able to recombine their existing resources...

Il mercato del gioco pubblico analizzato attraverso l'Approccio Sistemico Vitale presenta alcune criticità che non gli permettono di connaturarsi come sistema vitale e, pertanto, di generare valore. Ri-sulta necessario il ruolo dello Stato, che deve indirizzare e controllare l'operato degli attori che a vario titolo operano in questo sistema reti-c...

Purpose – Poverty, hunger, inequalities, diseases, unsustainable use of resources, etc., in spite of advances of the last decades, still result unsolved worldwide issues. All these issues relate to the challenges of sustainability and sustainable development that now call for urgent answers. Education is one of the key drivers of a really transform...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to reflect upon strategic marketing in emerging economies. It tries to answer the research question: what new business models are enabled by the VSA (Viable Systems Approach) and SDL (Service-Dominant Logic) perspectives? Design/Methodology/Approach – The paper is developed by integrating the contributions of two...

This article discusses how the core concepts of service-dominant logic—service-for-service exchange, value co-creation, value propositions, resource integration, and highly collaborative relationships—point to a generic actor conceptualization in which all actors engaged in exchange (e.g., firms, customers, etc.) are viewed as service providing, va...

With the aim of addressing a gap in service research on co-creation in health care, this study discusses the problem of information asymmetry in the service provider–user relationship by adopting the Viable Systems Approach. We develop a three-step interpretative framework to support the understanding of the health service relationship by going bey...

lays in identifying in the process of clinical testing to human disease (through direct observation) what the obstacles are [13,14] and allowing basic scientists as well as physicians to share their expertise to identify and compare the challenges at the interface between basic and clinical investigation, proposing integrated and integrating soluti...

Scope of Translational Medicine is to speed the development of new compounds of medical protocols and/or treatments to improve patient's quality of life. Translational medicine represents the synergy between epidemiology, basic research and clinical trials, and is based upon Innovation Management and Research Development in medicine. Being the spee...

This study valorizes the Viable Systems Approach (VSA) contribution to relationship management to explore the theoretical connections between Service-Dominant logic (SD logic) and Service Science (SS). It presents a conceptual analysis of recent developments in the study of relationships in SS, S-D logic, and VSA. As a broad interdisciplinary appro...

Purpose – Aim of the paper is to reflect upon strategic marketing in emerging economies. It tries to answer the research question: what new business models are enabled by the VSA and the SDL perspectives? Design/Methodology/Approach – The paper is developed by integrating the contribution of well established perspectives: the VSA (Viable Systems A...

The need for a systems approach to modelling and understanding service is now well established (Barile, 2009; Barile and Polese, 2009; Golinelli, 2010; Ng et.al., 2011a). Following the construction of Maglio et al. (2009), we view a service system as a network of agents and interactions that integrate resources for value co-creation. The context of...

Energy is a complex issue to deal with, and the paper’s purpose is to decline a systems theory reflections capable of interpreting complex phenomena in order to better design and manage future energy agendas. Achieving an efficient matching of energy demand and supply needs, introducing a market mechanism for the allocation and pricing of energy re...

The aim of this paper is to propose a systems interpretation of the concept of complexity and its implications for a theoretical discussion of the concept of boundary in complex service systems. The proposal highlights the interpretative contribution of a dual perspective of observation that distinguishes between a structure-based view and a system...

Purpose - Purpose of this contribution is to develop the notion of A2A relationships in service contexts (Gummesson, 2008; Gummesson and Polese, 2009; Vargo and Lusch, 2011) valorizing systems theories contributions. Recent service research advances highlight how much value co-creation processes are crucial in every service context. Both service sc...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight how systems thinking contributes to decision making in uncertain contexts that are characteristic of service systems. Based on the assumption that service systems face complex conditions, the paper posits that systems thinking may support the understanding of key issues in service management. Des...

Scope of the paper is improving our understanding of ‘value co-creation’, one of the cornerstones of the Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, which is focused on the undertaking of specific human interactive forms; to accomplish this goals the paper analyzes several organization theories’ insights, and specifically configuration theory, structuration theo...