Lars Witell

Lars Witell
Linköping University | LiU · Department of Management and Engineering (IEI)

Ph.D.

About

152
Publications
219,275
Reads
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8,997
Citations
Additional affiliations
June 2017 - August 2017
Stanford University
Position
  • Visiting Scholar
September 2016 - December 2016
University of Queensland
Position
  • Professor
December 2011 - December 2015
Chalmers University of Technology
Position
  • Professor

Publications

Publications (152)
Article
Full-text available
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide authors with guidelines for carrying out excellent qualitative service research. It describes the features that editors and reviewers use to evaluate qualitative research and pinpoints what authors can do to improve their manuscripts for publication. Design/methodology/approach The paper identifies f...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this study is to highlight the role of qualitative research in service research. This study discusses what qualitative research is, what role it has in service research and what interest, rigor, relevance and richness mean for qualitative service research. Design/methodology/approach This study examines the most common quali...
Article
Full-text available
Managing the customer experience has become a top priority for marketing managers and researchers. Research on customer experience management (CEM) has traditionally adopted a customer’s viewpoint. Few studies have explicitly embraced an organizational perspective, and existing research focuses mainly on business-to-consumer settings. The present s...
Article
Purpose – When using a service, customers often develop their own solutions by integrating resources to solve problems and co-create value. Drawing on innovation and creativity literature, this paper aims to investigate the influence of place (the service setting and the customer setting) on customer creativity in a health-care context. Design/meth...
Article
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Purpose - The present study aims to improve the understanding of green service. In particular, the focus is on identifying homopathic and heteropathic resource integration processes that preserve or increase the resourceness of the natural ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach - Through an extensive multiple case study involving 10 service provid...
Article
Purpose Drawing on value cocreation, this study examines health-care customers’ perceptions of patient-centered care (PCC) in hospital and online primary care settings. This study aims to address how are the key principles of PCC related, how the relationships between key PCC principles and outcomes (subjective well-being and service satisfaction)...
Chapter
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The growing cost of healthcare services, together with increasing demand, is a major concern for the healthcare sector. Innovation, particularly service innovation, has been put forward as a top priority to address the major challenges of healthcare. But how should a healthcare organization balance the needs of tomorrow through service innovation w...
Chapter
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The growing importance of service has brought greater opportunities for service innovations to influence the market and improve both customers’ and firms’ situations. Despite efforts by firms to develop service innovations, they often fail to introduce new services on the market. Ultimately, customers are the ones to assess, buy, and use a new serv...
Chapter
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Our modern society has created a new service landscape, where new service innovations that are built on digitalization and service infusion are introduced to create better customer experiences. This chapter introduces a service management model which is how service firms can navigate in the new service landscape. Service management is the core and...
Chapter
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In the competitive world of manufacturing, where profit margins deteriorate over time, service infusion might be a way to help a business turn in the right direction. This chapter briefly explains the concepts of servitization and service infusion, before identifying service growth opportunities and obstacles. From a strategy-based perspective, we...
Chapter
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Services are key enablers in the transformation toward the circular economy because they provide the prerequisites for sustainable value co-creation. Services in the circular economy include “traditional” offerings such as maintenance and remanufacturing, but also newer types of services in the sharing economy. This chapter discusses three sustaina...
Chapter
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This book chapter addresses how artificial intelligence (AI) engages in lying behavior in service encounters when customers interact with it when booking trips, investing money, or using customer service. The chapter concerns how AI learns from human behavior and how it practices the ethics of humans in service encounters. We identify three types o...
Article
The sharing economy, which is considered a better way of utilizing existing resources, is associated with positive effects not only on the financial aspects of sustainability but also on its environmental and social dimensions. But is this true? Previous research has typically discussed either the positive or negative aspects of the sharing busines...
Chapter
Service innovation is often viewed as the main source of growth in the modern economy. There is a general agreement that service innovation can provide a positive change for the environment, creating new types of jobs and making consumers’ lives easier. In this chapter, we challenge the positive view and provide arguments against service innovation...
Chapter
All products are services. This message from “Service Dominant Logic of Marketing,” (Vargo 2004) nearly two decades ago, has had a major impact on marketing theory and practice. This chapter discusses how this paradigm shift affects new product development (“NPD”) theory and practice today and going forward.
Article
Publicly funded national science agencies create value as innovation catalysts and through their scientific and research missions, they tackle wicked problems. Understanding how dynamic capabilities and business model innovation enable research‐intensive organisations to seize the market in the mission is key to translating bold new science that ha...
Chapter
The book chapter discusses the research on service innovation, covering what a service innovation is and what a sustainable service innovation is. A key insight is that service research has taken a customer perspective on service innovation, and we ask if this is enough for service innovation research to stay relevant. Research on service innovatio...
Article
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Purpose This study aims to describe social entrepreneurs' motivation during the social entrepreneurship process and identify different social entrepreneurs in terms of their social characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The descriptive research design uses a directed qualitative interpretative approach based on 17 cases of social entrepreneu...
Data
This file contains a link to an online article that discusses the published academic paper. The online article identifies some of the key principles of interest to managers.
Article
COVID-19 primarily spreads through close contact between humans and has affected retailing industries extremely hard. To manage the situation retailers have turned to service innovation to change their operations to make consumers feel safe while shopping. This research focuses on the role of service innovativeness in retailing firms during the COV...
Article
This study investigated how touchpoints moderate the antecedents of customer satisfaction with service encounters by comparing online and in-store encounters. Construal level theory was used within the Touchpoint, Context, Qualities (TCQ) Framework (De Keyser et al., 2020) to integrate a comprehensive model of how touchpoints-websites or stores-inf...
Article
Whether they know it or not, firms interact with lying consumers on a daily basis. However, surprisingly little is known about consumer lying behavior and its role in service encounters. Based on two empirical studies of 2,976 consumer lies, the study sought to explore consumer lying behavior by developing and testing a comprehensive conceptual fra...
Article
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This study explores the various roles of quality departments and investigates whether their roles have different influence on business results. Based on a survey of quality managers in 211 Swedish organisations, the analysis identifies four roles of quality departments: firefighters, auditors, process improvers, and orchestrators. The roles vary in...
Article
This study investigates how retailers can leverage their brand to shape customers' satisfaction with service encounters. It develops and tests hypotheses about how brand, store, and consumer factors moderate customer responses to experience clues during retail service encounters. Six meta-regression analyses synthesize and compare results from 842...
Article
This paper studies how customers of a global firm evaluate their experiences within and across 44 countries. It focuses on customers’ emotional, cognitive, sensory and behavioral responses to the catalog experience. It develops a theory-based model of satisfaction with the catalog experience as a function of experiential attributes and control vari...
Article
Equipment manufacturers are currently utilizing new digital technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, or Big Data, for new digital offerings. However, these offerings seldom enhance revenue, because companies struggle with business model (BM) dynamics. By analyzing 27 companies through an explorative case-study app...
Article
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While service design has been accepted as a human‐centered and cocreative approach to service innovation, its role in technology‐driven contexts, specifically technology startups, has been largely unexplored. Previous research suggests that technology startups tend to focus on technical aspects of innovation, neglecting the value cocreation potenti...
Article
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Purpose People are responsible for their wellbeing, yet whether they take ownership of their own or even others' wellbeing might vary from actor to actor. Such psychological ownership (PO) influences the dynamics of how wellbeing is co-created, particularly amongst actors, and ultimately determines actors' subjective wellbeing. The paper's research...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter synthesizes extant research on service innovation. It brings together literatures that are typically treated separately, identifying both shared and specific understandings of what service innovation is, and its implications for theory and practice. It begins by reviewing common characteristics, and models of service innovation. After...
Article
Purpose This paper considers the question: what would happen if healthcare providers, like their counterparts in the hospitality industry, adopted the principles of customer experience management (CEM) in order to facilitate a more holistic and personalized patient experience? It proposes an alternative vision of the patient experience by adding to...
Preprint
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This white paper looks at how firms can use digital platforms to develop new business models and revenue streams. To do this, it will answer the following research questions: 1 What is the customer experience paradox and what does it mean for firms? 2 How can a digital platform help solve the customer experience paradox? 3 How can digital platforms...
Article
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Service innovations challenge existing offerings and business models, shape existing markets, and create new ones. Over the last decade, service research has shown increasing interest in the concept of innovation and should by now have reached maturity and created a strong theoretical basis. However, there is no coherent theoretical framework that...
Preprint
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New technologies and new business models have already changed the way organisations interact with their customers.In the not too distant future, developments such as AI, robots and virtual reality will be a completely normal part of the customer experience. However, these new ways of engaging with customers will not replace face-to-face encounters...
Article
Purpose This study aims to investigate service modularization in a manufacturing firm, identifies service modularization processes and examines how these processes change the service module characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a longitudinal case study (2008-2017) of a manufacturing firm. The development of six serv...
Article
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Service innovation is a key driver of service infusion for manufacturers. Although service innovation is widely researched for service firms, it is less explored for service infusion in manufacturers. Existing research about service infusion considers developing customer knowledge in sales and service delivery, but there is scarce research about ho...
Article
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Purpose: This article explores innovations in customer experience at the intersection of the digital, physical, and social realms. It explicitly considers experiences involving new technology-enabled services, such as digital twins and automated social presence (i.e., virtual assistants, service robots). The challenges and opportunities facing serv...
Preprint
Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore innovations in customer experience at the intersection of the digital, physical and social realms. It explicitly considers experiences involving new technology-enabled services, such as digital twins and automated social presence (i.e. virtual assistants and service robots). Design/methodology/approac...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of back-office (BO) service capability and front-office (FO) service capability, and how firm age influences the impact of these service capabilities on small and medium size enterprise (SME) performance. Design/methodology/approach Based on the prior literature on servitization and firm o...
Article
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Purpose Open service innovation is an emergent new service development practice, where knowledge on how to organize development work is scarce. The purpose of the present research is to identify and describe relevant archetypes of open service innovation. The study views an archetype as an organizing template that includes the competence of partic...
Article
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The traditional firm and product-centric view of platforms is changing. Platforms are increasingly developed around value that is co-created with a network of actors. In such settings, lead firms shape their environments and develop value platforms through network orchestration. This study examines how lead firms mobilize network relationships to s...
Presentation
This study aims to validate factors driving satisfaction and loyalty in P2P service exchanges: feelings of belonging to a community, cost saving incentive, environmental motivation, non-ownership benefits, perceived exchange authenticity, P2P trust, trust in the platform, and supply/demand ratio. Whereas previous studies exploring the determinants...
Conference Paper
This paper presents a typology for green service. It is based on two dimensions: a resource integration dimension to differentiate between different efforts aiming to reduce, reuse, redistribute, recycle or renew resources (for instance natural or operant resources); and a dimension representing whether other ecosystem actors are actively or passiv...
Conference Paper
Purpose: Industrial services have traditionally been provided for free to support product sales. Nowadays, many manufacturers have built a profitable service business while others are struggling to improve their service profitability. Overall, most research focus on service infusion in the value proposition or servitization of the organization. Far...
Article
Manufacturers across many industries use service infusion to address the changing customer demands and improve their competitive position. However, understanding the drivers of successful service infusion is a complex process. Using business model and configuration theories, this study conceptualizes and analyzes the interplay of different driver d...
Article
Purpose The extant new service development (NSD) literature tends to assume that the key practices for NSD identified in one context apply for all services, and has failed to sufficiently consider differences in NSD between service types. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of NSD across different service types. Design/methodology/a...
Article
Service innovation is often viewed as a process of accessing the necessary resources, (re)combining them, and converting them into new services. The current knowledge on success factors for service innovation, such as formalized new service development (NSD) processes, predominantly comes from studying large firms with a relatively stable resource...
Article
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http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JOSM-01-2016-0018 Purpose The purpose of this study is to synthesize findings from health care research with those in service research to identify key conceptualizations of the changing role of the health care customer, to identify gaps in theory, and to propose a compelling research agenda. Design/me...
Article
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Retailers are the gatekeepers between consumers and eco-friendly products. As such, they can influence green shopping behavior. The results of an eye-tracking experiment show that retailers can attract consumers’ visual attention and increase the green premium through various practices such as providing relevant information, orienting consumers ins...
Article
Drawing on three studies using data from six separate samples of 1151 health care customers, the authors investigate cocreative customer practices, modeling the effects of customer value cocreation practices on well-being. Results highlight that while positive interactions with medical staff (doctors) lead to increased well-being through engaging i...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Purpose: The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to identify servitisation routes of SMEs, and (2) to identify the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities that influence the different steps of a continuous servitisation model. Design/Methodology/Approach: In this longitudinal study, servitisation in three product-oriented small and medium sized...
Book
The world is being shaped by service. All the world ’ s most advanced economies are dominated by service, with many countries having more than 70 percent of their gross domestic product ( GDP ) generated by it. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employee...
Article
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Reflections on Context in Service Research Abstract This article examines the nature of context and its implications for theory and research in service. It is a conceptual paper based on exploring existing research and theory related to context in service research. The paper shows how the characteristics of service make context both important and c...
Article
Download full paper for free here until July, 8, 2016: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1T3YTXj-jF9hi Drawing on service-dominant logic and institutional theory, this paper examines innovation as a process that unfolds through changes in the institutional arrangements that govern resource integration practices in service ecosystems. Four cases are us...
Article
Service innovation acts as society's engine of renewal and provides the necessary catalyst for the service sector's economic growth. Despite service innovation's importance, the concept remains fuzzy and poorly defined. Building on an extensive and systematic review of 1046 academic articles, this research investigates and explores how service inno...
Article
Full-text available
Research on service innovation appears in several research disciplines, with important contributions in marketing, management, and operations research. Although the concept is widely used, few research papers have explicitly defined service innovation. This dearth of research is the motivation for the present study. Through a systematic review of 1...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explore three paradoxes of service innovation and provide a way forward for fresh thinking on the topic. Design/methodology/approach – Through a conceptual model of service innovation research, the authors challenge the “pro-change” bias and explore what can be learnt from the duality of service innovation...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to encourage the reader to think differently about service-related issues and to strive to conduct service research that makes a transformational impact on individuals, organizations and society. The authors suggest that service researchers are in an excellent position to develop research that matters by makin...
Conference Paper
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The importance for manufacturing firms to add services to their offerings has been asserted over and over again (Neu and Brown 2005). Adding services to product sales require manufacturing firms to develop other types of offerings such as maintenance services, hybrid offerings or integrated solutions. This implies using new and often unknown practi...
Conference Paper
With the increasing importance of new services, various models for new service development have been created in research. An analysis has shown that such models typically consist of a development process covering activities from idea generation to market launch – implicitly claiming that one single process fits to all kind of services. However, fac...
Article
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When manufacturing firms increase the share of service revenues, managing service provision becomes challenging. This study extends previous research on servitisation in individual firms by analysing the challenges service provision creates in a value network. The challenges are identified both within the firms and in the business relationships in...
Chapter
In this chapter we focus on the role of customers in the development of public organizations. We aim to illustrate how customer involvement can be used not only to learn about customer needs, but also to create a tension for change. Following van de Ven (1984), we view tension for change as dissatisfaction with current conditions that trigger chang...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study investigates the impact of in-store marketing and packaging elements on green shopping behavior, aiming to further understand the attitude-behavior Green Gap. The results of first, a choice experiment with 127 respondents and second an eye-tracking experiment with 67 respondents show implications for the retail industry.
Article
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Purpose – This study aims to investigate how customer information obtained at different phases of a new product development (NPD) process influences profits from new offerings. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted in the context of NPD in goods and services. A unique database was constructed that merged key informant survey respons...
Article
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on customer orientation by developing and empirically testing a model that attempts to explain the elements that constitute customer orientation and that, in turn, influence customer satisfaction. In particular, this study focuses on how service firms design, collect, analyse an...
Article
Full-text available
Manufacturing firms develop and introduce service innovations to achieve a competitive advantage and differentiate their market offerings. The installed base of products becomes a platform for selling services hence improve their corporate revenues. Previous research has supported a number of hypotheses about how new product development (NPD) and n...
Conference Paper
Purpose: The importance of green services is increasing. The purpose of the research project is to develop a better understanding of the concept “green services” and its relationship to “service innovation”. The research questions are: What factors can define the green services concept? What are the distinctive characteristics of different types of...
Article
The digitalisation of society and a reduction in the need for printed media has resulted in dramatic changes to the pulp and paper industry. During the past 10 years, investments in this industry decreased by approximately 40 %. Consequently, service provision has become more important and a larger portion of the business of many capital equipment...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of innovation modes in understanding challenges of integrated NSD and NPD, and the use of structured NSD processes in manufacturing firms. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a two-stage multiple case study. The first stage is an interview study of 17 key informants repr...
Article
Full-text available
The theory of attractive quality and the Kano methodology were introduced about 30 years ago. Since then, research and practitioner communities have adopted both the theory and the methodology, as they help to explain the roles different quality attributes play for customers. This paper reviews 147 research papers published between 1984 and 2012 an...
Article
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Purpose – The purpose of the present research is to identify how business model innovation can be used to make the transition from service for free to service for fee. In particular, the focus is on identifying, describing and analysing alternative transition strategies, degree and type of innovation, and how building blocks in the business model c...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quality profile can evolve over time and, in particular, how different kinds of interventions can further develop or change an existing quality profile. Design/methodology/approach Data was collected over a five‐year period, including a literature review, interviews, a document study and ob...
Article
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Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate the role of key strategic factors in new service development (NSD). In particular, the role of service development strategy, a formalised development process, integrated development teams and customer co‐creation were investigated and the results were compared with managers' beliefs. Design/methodo...
Article
A firm working with quality management over time may change from total quality management to Six Sigma to lean production, but does this actually change the firm's quality profile? This paper seeks to identify specific quality profiles in service firms and how these profiles change over time. The empirical investigation is based on self-assessment...