Call for Papers

CfP special issue on "The future of shared services"

No longer accepting submissions

Guest Editors

Theme

The literature on electronic markets and business models (e.g. (Hewitt 2002), (Alt & Zimmermann 2014)) emphasizes that the move towards servitization is a pathway for generating value added (Skålén & Edvardsson, 2015), for redefining traditional business models (Teece, 2010) and for increasing the role of mobile business models (De Reuver et al., 2009). More recently, research on co-creation and innovation at the public services level (Alves, 2013; Leitão & Alves, 2016), has also denoted an increasing interest from both researchers and practitioners.

Shared services play a critical role in addressing public and private organizations as open systems and in designing the so-called ‘New Public Service’ (NPS), funded in greater engagement and collaboration (Paagman et al., 2015). As NPS many OECD countries have adopted NPS as explicit public sector policy, the trend that has been followed, until now, is fundamentally characterized by the consolidation of back-office functions using shared services models (Cooke, 2006). Deepening knowledge about this trend, is an ongoing and challenging task that deserves to be addressed by researchers, managers and decision makers seeking for innovative and sustainable business models.

For conciliating these related research communities, trends, ongoing debates and challenging tasks, different dimensions on servitization, co-creation and innovation and shared services, both in public and private spheres are appraised in the scope of the current special issue. We welcome qualitative as well as quantitative and mixed methodologies, as long as they are well grounded in the literature. In addition, evaluations on shared services implementation benchmarks can be considered, as long as they focus on innovative business models and multilevel platforms embracing governments, businesses and users.

Central issues and topics

Possible topics of submissions include, but are not limited to:

Co-creation and innovation:

  • Co-creation practices, innovation and organizational change
  • Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing platforms: public vs. private users
  • Design thinking and business model innovation
  • Sustainable business models and organizational change

Servitization:

  • Design of integrated product-service offerings: intramural or extramural R&D context
  • Organizational strategies for integrated product-service offerings: deliverer vs. user organizations

Shared services:

  • Knowledge intensive service activities (KISA) linking industry and service partners
  • Knowledge shared services and servitization
  • Mobile business models: public vs. private schemes of shared services
  • Outsourcing or nearshoring of business processes and services

We encourage contributions with a broad range of methodological approaches, including conceptual, qualitative and quantitative research. We would also like to welcome authors publishing on the topic of: The future of shared services; with reference to electronic markets and networked business. All papers should fit Electronic Markets’ scope (www.electronicmarkets.org/about-em/scope/). We also welcome contributions addressing related topics not listed above (please contact the special issue editors in that case to discuss the fit prior to submission).

All papers will be peer reviewed and should conform to Electronic Markets’ publication standards. Electronic Markets is a SSCI-listed journal (IF 1.404) and supports methodological and theoretical pluralism, i.e. empirical or theoretical work, qualitative research and design science are all welcome by the journal. If you would like to discuss any aspect of the special issue, please contact the guest editors.

Submission

All papers must be original, not published or under review elsewhere. Papers must be submitted via our electronic submission system at elma.edmgr.com.

Instructions, templates and general information are available at www.electronicmarkets.org/authors.

Please note that the preferred article length is approx. 6,500 words (excluding references).

Submission Deadline: September 14, 2017