Katrien Verleye

Despite the increasing interest in circular business models (CBMs), how they engage customers and other stakeholders is still under‐researched, limiting their broader implementation. This study addresses this gap by examining how CBMs can foster engagement through their value propositions. Through a literature review, we identify four key dimensions of value propositions: brand, quality, price, and circularity. Using a discrete choice conjoint experiment ( n = 365), we assess their impact on customer decision‐making, offering valuable insights for advancing their engagement with CBMs. Our findings offer critical insights: lower prices significantly boost customer engagement, while high‐end brands and high quality also drive higher engagement compared with their lower‐end counterparts. Surprisingly, higher levels of circularity (reduce and reuse) reduce engagement, contrasting with lower levels of circularity (recycling) and linearity. These findings have both theoretical and practical contributions, highlighting how value propositions can enhance customer engagement and unlock the potential of CBMs to drive sustainable consumption.

This research aims to generate a nuanced understanding of service robot customer experiences (SR-CX). Specifically, this work (1) empirically explores the impact of different AI intelligences (mechanical, thinking, and feeling AI) on SR-CX (i.e., SR-CX strength and SR-CX dimensionality) and its downstream impact on important service outcomes (i.e., overall service experience and service usage intentions), and (2) considers the moderating role of consumer service goals (hedonic versus utilitarian). Drawing on insights from two field studies and two online experiments, this research demonstrates that SR-CX—which is impacted differently by varying AI intelligences—affects service outcomes. Specifically, more sophisticated AI intelligences lead to enhanced service outcomes for customers with hedonic service goals across settings by strengthening SR-CX and triggering a more extensive set of SR-CX dimensions. This pattern, however, is less clear for customers driven by utilitarian service goals. For these customers, the role of SR-CX strength and SR-CX dimensionality varies across settings. These findings, which empirically support the importance of SR-CX, may help organizations to strategically leverage robots with different intelligence levels along service journeys of customers with different service goals.

Pressing grand challenges such as climate change and social inequality urge a transition from linear business models to circular business models. Researchers, practitioners and policymakers, however, point out that engaging actors with circular business models is a key challenge. Therefore, efforts to uncover determinants of engagement with circular business models are strongly encouraged. This chapter introduces the concepts of ‘circular business models’ and ‘actor engagement’ before delving into the role of engagement platforms to stimulate actor engagement with circular business models. In doing so, this chapter helps circular business models to elicit demand-side as well as supply-side engagement so that these business models can realise their circular potential even more.

Purpose: The aim of this research is to provide insight into how organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of customers experiencing vulnerabilities, thereby paying attention to their organizational practices (i.e. recursive or routinized patterns of organizational actions and behaviors).Design/methodology/approach: To investigate, this research relies upon a multiple case study in a group of nursing homes in Flanders that had the ambition to engage family members in service journeys of their loved ones while measuring their value perceptions as a performance indicator (here, satisfaction with nursing home services).Findings: The case evidence shows that nursing homes co-create value with family members through caring practices that focus on their role as secondary customers (i.e. welcoming, connecting and embedding) and empowering practices that focus on their role as partial employees (i.e. teaming up, informing and listening practices). However, the way in which the different caring and empowering practices are enacted by the nursing home and its staff affects their value co-creation potential.Originality/value: By focusing on the practices with which organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of their loved ones, this research bridges the service literature with its attention for value co-creation practices and the literature on customers experiencing vulnerabilities with its focus on extended customer entities.

Circular business models (CBMs), such as product-service systems, are rapidly gaining traction in light of a transition to a more circular and sustainable economy. The authors call for a new approach to inform and guide the development and adoption of these CBMs. The main reason is that different actors in the service ecosystems or networks linked to these business models—such as firms, customers, and governmental bodies—may be reluctant to join or even impede the transition to a circular economy. Based upon an abductive analysis of 133 CBM papers with the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability (MOA) framework as organizing structure, the authors theorize about how to achieve “circular economy engagement” ( i.e., an actor’s disposition to embrace CBMs). Specifically, they highlight and illustrate the role of (1) signaling and convincing as motivation-related practices, (2) matching and legitimizing as opportunity-related practices, and (3) supporting and empowering as ability-related practices. The authors provide illustrative cases for each of these practices along with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications and the remaining challenges—all with the key aim to push the transition to a circular economy forward.

As smart technology develops at an ever-increasing pace, firms are investing heavily in boosting the smartness of their service systems. To support these endeavors, practitioners and researchers call for guidance on how to account for customers’ complex needs and wants when making smartness decisions. This research adopts the firm’s perspective on investigating how and why decisions on smartness are undertaken. It examines how firms configure the smartness of service systems and communicate the intended value to customers through value propositions. Critically, it further unravels why firms make these decisions on the basis of their reasoning about aligning resources to create value for customers—that is, the firm’s value creation logic. Our analysis of multiple case studies across several industry sectors reveals a number of pathways to service system smartness. These are labeled cautious, tailored, premium, and balanced pathways, and each entails specific combinations of smartness configurations and customer value propositions, underpinned by particular logics. A more nuanced analysis shows that firms may pursue multiple pathways simultaneously when targeting different customer segments and indicates how firms’ characteristics may shape their pathways to smartness. The resulting framework can operate as a guiding tool for managers and consultants when making important smartness decisions.

Background: The last decade has seen a considerable increase in the number of mobile health (mHealth) apps in everyday life. These mHealth apps have the potential to significantly improve the well-being of chronically ill patients. However, behavioral engagement with mHealth apps remains low. Objective: The aim of this study was to describe the behavioral engagement of chronically ill patients with mHealth apps by investigating (1) how it is affected by social factors (ie, physician recommendation) and app-related factors (ie, app integration) and (2) how it affects patient well-being. This study also considers the moderating effect of attachment to traditional health care and the mobile app experience among patients. Methods: We carried out a scenario-based survey study of chronically ill patients (N=521). A Bayesian structural equation modeling with mediation and moderation analysis was conducted in MPlus. Results: Both physician recommendations for mHealth app use and app integration have positive effects on the behavioral engagement of chronically ill patients with mHealth apps. Higher behavioral engagement positively affects the hedonic well-being (extent of pleasure) and the eudaemonic well-being (extent of self-efficacy) of chronically ill patients. Mobile app experience, however, positively moderates the relationship between app integration and behavioral engagement, whereas patient attachment to traditional care does not moderate the relationship between physician recommendation and behavioral engagement. Taken together, the proportion of variance explained (R²) equals 21% for behavioral engagement and 52.8% and 62.2% for hedonic and eudaemonic well-being, respectively, thereby providing support for the strong influence of app integration and physician recommendation via the mediation of the patients’ behavioral engagement on both patients’ hedonic and eudaemonic well-being. Conclusions: Physician recommendation and app integration enable behavioral engagement and promote well-being among chronically ill patients. It is thus important to take social and app-related factors into consideration during and after the development of mHealth apps.

The world is affected by environmental and social challenges, resulting in calls for engaging consumers with initiatives focused on sharing underutilized resources in Western countries. Meanwhile, ...