The role of psychological distance in value creation

Purpose – The field of service research has devoted consider able attention to the customer's role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers' psychological processes in value creation. This paper highlights the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer's perceived distance from service interactions in terms of spatial distance, temporal distance social distance and hypothetical distance. Critically, psychological distance influences cognitive processes and can influence how customers think and feel about the service interaction. An appreciation of psychological distance within service contexts can help managers to tailor the interaction in order to facilitate value creation. Methodology/approach – In this conceptual paper, we build on psychology research and service research to develop seven propositions that explore how psychological distance can operate within service interactions and how this might influence value creation. Findings – We divide the propositions into three sections. The first concerns how perceived psychological distance from the service interaction can act as a barrier to entering a service interaction. In particular, we consider the influence of social distance and spatial distance within the context of service interactions. The second section examines how psychological distance to the expected point of service use can influence how customers construe the service and the value creation. The third aspect addresses customer-specific characteristics that can impact on value creation by influencing perceived psychological distance toward the service

Engineering of interworking TINA-based telecommunication services

This paper describes a Service Creation approach being developed in the EU funded ACTS TOSCA (TINA Open Service Creation Architecture) project to rapidly develop validated TINA based multimedia telecommunications services. The approach is based around object-oriented software frameworks in SDL which are specialized towards services by means of graphical paradigm tools. Further, in TOSCA, the need for service interworking across service provider domains via federation has been recognized in order to allow users to join service sessions offered by providers they are not customers of. However, service interworking may cause undesired behavior - the so called service interaction phenomenon. This paper focuses on this issue and the underlying technology of the service creation approach with emphasis on how service federation has been implemented

A model-based approach to service creation

This paper presents a model-based approach to support service creation. In this approach, services are assumed to be created from (available) software components. The creation process may involve multiple design steps in which the requested service is repeatedly decomposed into more detailed functional parts, until these parts can be mapped onto software components. A modelling language is used to express and enable analysis of the resulting designs, in particular the behaviour aspects. Methods are needed to verify the correctness of each design step. A technique called behaviour refinement is introduced to assess the conformance relation between an abstract behaviour and a more concrete (detailed) behaviour. This technique is based on the application of abstraction rules to determine the abstraction of the concrete behaviour such that the obtained abstraction can be compared to the original abstract behaviour. The application of this refinement technique throughout the creation process enforces the correctness of the created servic

Solution selling and value co-creation : different forms and contexts

Creating customer solutions is said to embody the new service-dominant logic (Sharma, Iyer, & Evanschitzky, 2008; Tuli, Kohli, & Bharadwaj, 2007); the elaboration of solutions is likely to result from a value co-creation process involving actors from both the supply network and the customer network (Cova & Salle, 2007). Value co-creation addresses the growing importance of customer involvement in an organization; service-dominant logic states that the customer is always a co-creator of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) but the extent to which customers co-create value and facilitate the creation of solutions in a range of Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer contexts is, as yet, undetermined. This conceptual, exploratory research investigates value co-creation through a set of four encounters between firm, customer, and other networks based on a solution selling model(Tuli, et al., 2007). Using a pre-determined sample of service firms a set of expert ratings was gathered to analyze the level of value co-creation during the encounters. The results of the ratings suggest that firms create solutions and co-create in different ways during the 4 stages of the encounter process. A series of semi-structured interviews suggested that firms would benefit from a greater understanding of the forms of value co-creation, and the contexts where they can best be applied to a solution selling model. The research concludes by suggesting a conceptual framework for analyzing value co-creation in service firms and its potential impact on firm activity and performance

Experiences modelling and using object-oriented telecommunication service frameworks in SDL

This paper describes experiences in using SDL and its associated tools to create telecommunication services by producing and specialising object-oriented frameworks. The chosen approach recognises the need for the rapid creation of validated telecommunication services. It introduces two stages to service creation. Firstly a software expert produces a service framework, and secondly a telecommunications ‘business consultant' specialises the framework by means of graphical tools to rapidly produce services. Here the focus is given to the underlying technology required. In particular, the advantages and disadvantages of SDL and tools for this purpose are highlighted