Introduction to the Special Section on the 2013 Naples Forum on Service: From Traditional Pillars to Future Research Avenues

Abstract

The Naples Forum on Service was held for the third time in June 2013 on the charming island of Ischia, which served once again as an inspiring and constructive research setting. One hundred fifty participants from more than 25 countries engaged in cross-cutting discussions with only limited opportunities for presentations, which, coupled with the diverse cultural backgrounds of the scientists, allowed for debates and conversations to find shared research paths. We are grateful to Service Science for the opportunity presented by this special section, and we are convinced that service science itself may benefit by multicultural perspectives. Service science is the study of complex service systems. Such a simple and straightforward definition opens up many intriguing issues given the ample set of disciplines, research methods (Gummesson 2005), cultural domains, and areas of interest required to capture the powerful insights and essence of service in the technological settings of modern life (Maglio 2011, Maglio and Spohrer 2008). Despite this shared and multifaceted concept, more effort must be invested by researchers outside the traditional disciplines of operations research and industrial engineering. To this end, the Naples Forum may contribute to development of service science, providing different perspectives that address the same issues from marketing, design, systems thinking, and other directions (for a full view of the forum scientific background and discussions, see http://www.naplesforumonservice.it). Service research started 40 years ago, and it is only now that we are beginning to sense the full picture of our economies as complex networks of service systems with a mission to enhance value for consumers, citizens, businesses, and society as a whole (Gummesson and Mele 2010, Gummesson and Polese 2009, Mele and Polese 2010, Wieland et al. 2012). The Naples Forum is an effort to stimulate the development of a new marketing paradigm (Golinelli et al. 2012, Gummesson et al. 2010) that is based on service science (Maglio et al. 2011; Spohrer et al. 2007, 2008), network and systems thinking (Badinelli et al. 2012; Barile et al. 2012a, b; Mele et al. 2010; Polese et al. 2009), and service-dominant logic (Lusch and Vargo 2006, 2014; Vargo and Lusch 2008); in stimulating this development, the new paradigm’s progress can be communicated and made more efficient. The forum supports publication by inviting participants to publish their presented work in special sections and issues of journals; for this special section of Service Science, we have selected some of the most interesting papers. In the first article, “When Trust Makes It Worse—Rating Agencies as Disembedded Service Systems in the U.S. Financial Crisis,” Helge Lobler argues against the common explanation of the recent U.S. financial crisis—namely, the lack of a system perspective—and instead focuses on individual and organizational moral or legal responsibility, thus proposing a richer view in which trust is a question of enabling cooperation among social systems. The second article is by Katarina Wetter-Edman, Daniela Sangiorgi, Bo Edvardsson, Stefan Holmlid, Christian Gronroos, and Tuuli Mattelmaki; “Design for Value Co-Creation: Exploring Synergies Between Design for Service and Service Logic” connects Service Logic research, which provides a framework to understand service systems in action by focusing on how actors integrate resources to co-create value, with practice and research in Design for Service, which provides an approach and tools to analyze current service systems in context to imagine future service systems and how innovation may develop as a result of reconfigurations of resources and actors.