The sharing economy is an emerging niche for innovation capable of disrupting established socio-technical and economic regimes. Because of this potential to cause radical changes in a wide array of domains, research in multiple disciplines addressing various aspects entailing this phenomenon is proliferating. In this emerging body of literature, the understanding and framing of the sharing economy are often different. Without knowledge about the current state of the research related to the sharing economy, delineating research trends, gaps, and needs for directing effectively primary research are not possible. This study aimed to synthesize the state and distribution of existing publications related to the sharing economy in multiple disciplines. We used the systematic mapping technique to scope, identify, and classify the publications at a fine level of granularity. We reviewed 589 journal articles (published from 1978 to 2017), and 454 met the selection criteria. The journal articles reviewed were published in 284 different journals. Intriguingly, 15 journals published five to 13 publications each and 221 journals had a single article about the topic. Journals belonging to the subject areas “business, management and accounting” (42.1%) and “social sciences” (35.2%) published more than 70% of the reviewed publications. Accommodation (19.8%) and car and ridesharing (17.2%) were the two most prominent sectors; 50.2% of the publications addressed C2C transactions (10.6% B2C, 24.4% more than one type); 62.3% were about accessing resources, and 5.1% concerned transfer of ownership (i.e., second-hand or donation); and 19.2% covered access and transfer of ownership simultaneously. While empirical studies were the majority (53.1%, when comparing with conceptual ones), qualitative approaches were most common (51.5% against 24.9% quantitative and 17.4% mixed methods). Literature review (22.9%), survey (13.2%), case study (7.3%) and interview (7%) were the most frequently used methods. User behavior (26.4%), business models and organizational aspects (22.7%), institution and governance system (18.7%), conceptualization matters (17%), and sustainability evaluation (15.3%) are research clusters identified from a grounded approach. The link between user behavior and net environmental impacts of sharing options was the largest gap found in the research needing attention from a sustainability perspective. Accordingly, multidisciplinary investigations quantifying behavioral root causes, magnitude, and likelihood of environmental rebound effects using real-world data are strongly encouraged.

The main purpose of this study is to propose a visitor centric perspective that can support museums towards sustainability. The main premise of this study is due to a concept of economic and social sustainability of museums, defined as the possession of sufficient resources to maintain the existence of an organization, and achieve their goals in the future, ensuring a certain flow of visitors. A great number of museums are characterized by a low number of visits; therefore, in order to become sustainable, museums should pay attention to audience and its internal diversity. In this way, a cultural site can plan tailored strategies to increase the number of visits and re-visits and to achieve community support. For this reason it is necessary to understand the cultural needs of visitors, acquiring appropriate monitoring tools, such as qualitative and quantitative ones. Generally, quantitative analyses are more reliable and complete, even if they require a considerable number of observations for the reliability of the results. Moreover, qualitative analysis provides more in depth information, even if their data do not allow us to make generalizations. The qualitative and quantitative methods for the detection of satisfaction are usually used separately, but their integration may bring significant added value in terms of the wealth of information. This study follows the analysis of the potential of the integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques customized with respect to different types of targets. The results of the experimentation performed on ethnographic museums shows a consistency of the results obtained by the two different tools that increase the capacity information of survey instruments.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore why innovative service ecosystems scale up, using a service-dominant logic lens. The focus is on identifying the key drivers of the scaling-up process as the basis for a new conceptual framework on the scaling up of service innovations.Design/methodology/approach: An inductive research design is used to zoom in on two innovative service ecosystems, Eataly and KidZania, to identify the key drivers that can explain why innovations scale up. For both companies, the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, archival sources and in-store observations is used as complementary data sets. Multiple investigators and multiple coders have been involved in the data collection, coding process and analysis.Findings: An extended conceptualization of service innovation is obtained, grounded in a framework of four drivers of scaling up: effectuation as the basis for creating the value proposition; sensing and adapting to local contexts; the reconfiguration and alignment of resources and forms for collaboration between actors; and values’ resonance.Originality/value: This study represents one of the first empirical investigations of the key drivers of the scaling up process of service innovations. The paper contributes with a conceptualization of service innovation and why scaling-up processes emerge, emphasizing the existence of multiple constellations of four drivers.