The paper aims to advocate the incorporating of the sustainability perspective into the management control system of healthcare organizations. The study is based on two main premises: (1) the evolution of business models towards a wide perspective of the sustainability approach; (2) the evolution of control systems in healthcare organizations towards a control-based approach to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the service targeted primarily to cut costs and expenses. Our methodology is developed at theoretical and conceptual level starting from: (1) a literature review on the issue, highlighting main trends and gaps and (2) the adoption of the Viable Systems Approach (VSA) as a conceptual framework oriented to integrate a wide variety of stakeholder perspectives and interests into the business model. Our findings lead us to introduce the Systems Viability Monitoring Model for Sustainability as a potential reference framework to build healthcare management control systems in which the notion of ‘systems viability,’ as defined by VSA, becomes a bridging concept by means of which the sustainability perspective can be incorporated into the management control system of healthcare organizations.
Marketing, advertising, and communications processes have changed to strategically capitalize on an increasingly digitally transformed, technologically empowered, globally interconnected consumer, or what service-dominant logic refers to as actors that are resource integrators. Customers are co-creators of value in the collaborative or sharing economy, and seek to actively reap the benefits of new knowledge growing at an exponential rate. However, developing models of customer behavior, especially the influence of a new kind of advertising based on the integrated use of television, web, and social networks, is a challenge. Our study starts from a preliminary empirical observation of the impact of television cooking shows on the variations of potential demand (queries on Google) and the purchase of branded/unbranded culinary products used on the show. Neural networks were used to determine significant correlations, which resulted in an operative Marketing 3.0 model. This model clearly explicates this impact factor on the consumer-purchasing process generated by a new mode of creating information and communications technology–based communication. As a result, by using these types of models businesses can more strategically plan the presence of products of interest on television programs designed according to M@SECI and M@BA (a pervasive smart-space model for online marketing).