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Business-to-Business electronic commerce websites are a common form of inter-organizational systems that span organizational boundaries and enables organizations to exchange information in a seamless fashion. To reap the desired benefits it is important that the website be used in the intended manner. The level and extent of use of a business-to-business website depends partly on the inclination to use the website by the users in the primary organization and in the user organizations independently and the combined inclination of the organizations together. This combined inclination is referred to as the System Inclination, with dominance playing a key role. Each organization has certain characteristics of its own and may differ significantly in their inclination to use. It is important to analyze the factors that determine this inclination to use, so that organizations can adopt appropriate management mechanisms to control it. This paper proposes a framework to explain the organizational factors and their influence on the inclination to use a website, based on study of four Indian buyer-supplier dyads. Inclination to use is found to be influenced by factors like top management support, website characteristics, adequate support mechanisms, user group orientation towards electronic commerce and basic IT drive among the employees, at both the primary and user organizations.

Social networking services (SNSs) have become important and popular tools for not only presenting self-image but also sharing travel information. This study adopted self-image expressions to understand tourists’ intentions to share travel information and behavioral changes in SNSs. To enhance understanding tourists’ intention and behavior, the current study suggests a research model based on motivations for self-image expression (i.e., creativity, altruism and social relationship). This current study empirically resulted in the importance of users’ creativity, altruism and social relationship in SNS, which leads to the intention and behavioral changes to share travel information. In addition, altruism moderated the negative effect of creativity on self-image expression as well as the positive effect of the social relationship on self-image expression. Based on the result of this study, the current study bears some implications in a theoretical and practical context.

We study the antecedents to tie formation on an (Facebook-like) enterprise social media platform implemented to support cross-boundary connections. Research has produced mixed findings regarding the role of social media in cultivating bridging vs. closed networks. We examine the tie formation patterns of 1,386 enterprise social media users over a two-year period. Specifically, we observe who became (or chose not s become) “friends” with whom at the dyadic level and relate the decisions to various mechanisms that affect one’s network to expand, constrain, or bridge. Using logistic and OLS regressions, we find that users tend to form ties via reciprocity and transitivity (with friends of friends), both of which help expand one’s network. We also find strong networking tendency toward functional and hierarchical homophily (same business unit and same rank, respectively), which is likely to constrain one’s network (closed network structure). We find that one’s participation in various online interest groups is likely to open one’s network (bridging network structure) while no evidence found for preferential attachment. Overall, we find that enterprise social media offers features, some of which are likely to foster bridging while others foster closed networks via different mechanisms.

This editorial on ‘Smart Services and Internet of Things (IoT)’ focuses on the topics related to the applications of IoT to consumer products and services, which have become ‘smarter’ thanks to IoT. This special issue explores, in different ways, the phenomena of smart services and the role of IoT in business innovation across different contexts such as product-service system, car auction, tourism industry, communicating platform, online travel agency, self-service retail, and bike sharing. We hope that this special issue will provide a significant step forward in enabling researchers and practitioners to understand smart services and IoT.

The sharing economy has significantly changed the way of living for years. The emergence and expansion of sharing economy empowered by the mobile information technologies and intellectual algorithms reconfigure how people use transportation means. In this paper, the bike sharing phenomenon is highlighted. Combining a big data set provided by the Seoul government about user logs and air quality data set, the empirical findings reveal that temperature change is tightly associated bike sharing activities. Also, the concentration of particulate matter is weakly related to bike sharing, but the trend should be carefully examined. By considering external environmental factors to bike sharing businesses, this work is differentiated. To further understand empirical data, data mining methods and econometric approaches were adopted.

This paper investigates how firms increase customer acceptance of self-service technologies in retail, and the impact of self-efficacy on customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty. We conducted our empirical research by administering 308 questionnaires to customers of self-service convenience stores in China. We employed a structural equation model to analyze the relationship between service quality, revisit intention, and word of mouth. The results indicate that perceived service quality significantly influences customer satisfaction, with the service quality of self-service retail and experience value being important factors in consumer acceptance of self-service retail stores. Additionally, we investigated the relationship between customer experience value, satisfaction, and loyalty, and found that self-service retail stores exert a significant impact on perceived self-efficacy. Informed by the research on customer acceptance of self-service technologies in retail, promoting further development of self-service retail technologies can effectively aid companies in generating profit while offering more convenience to customers.

In a new age of smart tourism, free independent travelers (FITs) choose their travel routes in a more diversified and less predictable way with the aid of smart services. This paper focuses on the movements of Chinese outbound FITs in the U.S. in the year of 2018. 110 places to visit (destinations) extracted from 122 travel routes recommendations on Qyer.com, a major online travel community in China, are analyzed with social network analysis (SNA). Based on the results of SNA, employing degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality, network visualization, and cluster diagram methods, some preferred cities and natural attractions outside city centers (i.e., New York City (NYC), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Niagara Falls) are identified. Moreover, it is found that NYC in the East and Los Angeles in the West play a major role in the movements of Chinese FITs. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on tourist destination movements and provides valuable implications for smart service development in the tourism and hospitality industry.

As the growth of online travel agencies (hereafter OTAs) accelerates, competition among hotels to gain exposure on the first page of OTA websites, and the financial burden, such as commissions hotels have to pay in return, are increasing. Therefore, to facilitate successful management in the tourism industry, it is important to establish what makes people continue the practice of using OTAs to book rooms in hotels and other accommodation outlets. By adopting the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), this study explores the factors that drive consumers’ continued use of OTA and classifies them into heuristic cues (brand awareness, cost saving, and scarcity message) and systematic cues (recommendation quality and the ability to provide reputation). Furthermore, we divided the sample based on the location of hotels within and outside Korea, and investigated the different roles of the cues between two models. The results are expected to provide theoretical and practical implications for both OTAs and hotels.

The WeChat mini program is an application embedded in WeChat that users can use without downloading and installing. After it was officially released in 2017, many travel enterprises have launched their own mini programs on the WeChat platform. This study applies affordance theory to investigate the WeChat mini program’s role in tourism activities through social network analysis using the R programming language. The authors searched the topic of “how do you perceive the travel-related WeChat mini program” and then crawled the 200 comments found; 180 comments were analyzed after data cleansing. The results show that travel-related WeChat mini programs play a very important role in Chinese social network tourism activities. This paper found that WeChat played a more active role in various tourism-related interactions with Chinese social networks. Moreover, the results show how affordance theory is applied to the use of WeChat mini programs.

Many cities in the world have increased initiative to realize smart tourism. There are unexplored challenges for the people which lead and manage smart tourism projects and realize its value in tourism (we call them as ‘Smart tourism initiatives’), such as orchestrating of tourism complexity, developing and sharing tourism strategy, sustaining tourism projects and innovation. Concerning these challenges, we aim to design a holistic capability maturity model for sustainable and smart tourism governance enabling sustainable tourism innovations via tackling the challenges above. We adopted Dynamic capability theory as a theoretical lens and introduced Design science research methodology in order to develop a new capability maturity governance model as a design artifact. As a result of the study, we could synthesize findings from iterations of the design research cycle based on the IT Capability Maturity Model. Our result proposes a potential capability maturity model supporting effective communication and strategic alignment for the initiatives with illuminating future paths with evaluation methods on tourism capabilities for the initiatives. Throughout this study, we contribute to the body of knowledge as well as practice by proposing a new tourism capability governance model.

Product–service systems (PSS), integrating physical products and services, currently play a crucial role in sustainable economies. In addition to the highly competitive global economy, the emergence of new digital paradigms is supporting the shift toward servitization. Although the great potential of such paradigms is recognized by both practice and research, their implications for PSS are not yet clear. In particular, features of Internet of Things (IoT), such as total connectedness and ubiquity of smart sensors and actuators, provide various new opportunities for PSS. This study explores such opportunities by conducting structured literature review and 13 interviews. We organize the findings in two folds: First, we introduce four degrees of IoT involvement in PSS business models and elaborate the opportunities that they create for different types of PSS. Second, we present the key technologies and approaches that IoT provides concerning PSS lifecycle management.