International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences

From service quality to experience and back again?

Jon Sundbo

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Jon Sundbo , (2015),"From service quality to experience and back again?", International Journal of
Quality and Service Sciences, Vol. 7 Iss 1 pp. 107 - 119
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From service quality to

experience and back again?

From service
quality to
experience

Jon Sundbo
Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies,
Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

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Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to analyse the movement in the focus on customers within service
management and marketing theories and service research that has taken place during the past three
decades. The paper addresses the question: How did we, in service research, change from emphasizing
quality to emphasizing experience?
Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses developments in service and experience
theories. Experience has come onto the theoretical agenda, both in its own right and as a concept within
service marketing and management theory.
Findings Experience has increasingly been a concept that has replaced quality in service marketing
theories. However, an independent experience economy paradigm has also emerged. Recently, the
societal emphasis on productivity may lead back to functional quality re-emerges in theories; however,
it will most likely be in a new version.
Originality/value This analysis is a profound theory-critical analysis of the actually very widely
used concept experience in service theories. The analysis present an understanding of what experience
means in these theories and how it relates to the quality concept. This is an original contribution to a
deeper understanding of service marketing and service quality theories.
Keywords Marketing, Service, Customers, Quality, Experience
Paper type Conceptual paper

1. Introduction
This paper analyses the movement in the focus on customers within service
management and marketing theories and service research that has taken place during
the past three decades. The paper addresses the question: How did we, in service
research, change from emphasizing quality to emphasizing experience? The discussion
is carried out in relation to what is crucial for persons in their role as consumers or
customers, if we see them from the supplier side.
Experience has come onto the agenda, both in its own right and as a concept within
service marketing and management theory (Schmitt, 1999; Pine and Gilmore, 1999;
Jensen, 1999; Mossberg, 2003, 2007; Sundbo and Srensen, 2013). The aim of this paper
is to discuss the relation between experience and services both in theory and practice.
This discussion raises the question of whether experience is replacing service
quality as the key to characterizing and understanding customer relations within
service businesses. This is important for finding out where the understanding of service
management is today, and whether service management is being replaced by a kind of
experience management as the approach to understanding how firms attempt to create
more loyal customers and greater profits. The theme challenges the idea of service
dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2006) that has been very popular over the past decade.

International Journal of Quality

and Service Sciences
Vol. 7 No. 1, 2015
pp. 107-119
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1756-669X
DOI 10.1108/IJQSS-01-2015-0009

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It might be discussed whether this service dominant logic will be replaced by an

experience dominant logic as a general business marketing approach, also outside the
services.
However, before such a discussion can be carried out, we need to understand what
experience is and what the essence of the concept of experience is. This is not as easy as
it sometimes looks in marketing, which is the field that has most quickly adopted the
concept of experience (Berry et al., 2006; Berry and Carbone, 2007; Verhoef et al., 2009).
Finally, an obvious theme is whether the focus currently is going back to an emphasis
on quality though in a more operational and rational way, which is not the perceived
quality (cf. Grnroos, 2000). The economic crisis that started in 2008 has led to an
emphasis on productivity, rationality and technology both within business and in
society more generally. This development raises the question: Are we on the way back
to quality? And, if so, which kind of quality? These questions will be discussed in the end
of the paper.
The paper begins by discussing why the concept of experience has emerged on the
agenda. Next, it is discussed what experience is and what the concept has to do with the
concept of service. After that the main discussion of how experience is included in
service production and delivery will be carried out, and a model of the changing
customer focus is offered. The paper ends with the discussion of whether hard core
industrial (productivity and operational use) quality (cf. Levitt, 1972) is actually coming
onto the agenda.
2. What has brought experience onto the agenda?
Experience has arrived on the agenda from particularly two scientific milieus or
disciplines. One is marketing, the other is an emerging experience economy perspective.
Within marketing, the notion of customer experience has been used for a long time
(Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Bassi and Guido, 2006; Meyer and Schwager, 2007;
Berry and Carbone, 2007) to explain increased sale, because of its link to customer
loyalty. The basis for this is an understanding of customers not only as individuals who
decide on purchase from a functional need-use perspective, they also buy goods and
services based on their experiences of the purchasing process and how a good or service
functions in practice. Theoretically, it is argued that experience creates value for
customers, although it is rarely clearly defined what value means except that it is a
psychological and sometimes sociological phenomenon in contrast to economic value
(however, this issue is investigated in some articles, for example, Helkkula et al., 2012).
This view has been repeated many times, particularly in the service marketing or
customer relations marketing discourse (Arnould and Price, 1993; Edvardsson et al.,
2005; Kwortnik and Thompson, 2009; Zomerdijk and Voss, 2010). The notion of service
experience is often used (Helkkula, 2010). However, the experience aspect of purchase
and marketing is not only connected to services, it may just as well be connected to
goods. Although service marketing theories, the service dominant logic discourse in
particular, often claim that the service marketing discourses understanding should be
universal, the experience aspect may just as well be connected to other marketing
discourses that have nothing to do with services. It may be applied to traditional
understanding of the mass marketing of goods; people may, for example, have
experiences with goods they have bought and now use.

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Whatever a critical or positive perspective may be applied to different marketing

theory paradigms, these paradigms have together put experience on the agenda.
Experience is within marketing theory generally understood as a means to sell goods
and services, rarely as something that is sold in its own right a product in itself.
Experience marketing (Schmitt, 1999; Schmitt et al., 2004; Tynan and McKechnie, 2009;
Smilanski, 2009) is generally not about how to sell experience products, but how to use
experience to sell goods and services.
The other perspective that has brought experience onto the agenda, focuses more on
experience as a product in itself. The experience economy perspective is a new one that
has emerged within the past 15 years (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Department for Culture,
Media and Sport, 2001; KK Stiftelsen, 2003; Erhvervs-og byggestyrelsen, 2008; Sundbo
and Srensen, 2013). In the beginning, this perspective emphasized experience as a
general marketing means. For example Pine and Gilmore (1999), who must be ascribed
the invention of the particular experience economy notion, argue that experience is an
aspect of both goods and services. They hereby go into the line of argumentation that the
customer relationship service marketing discourse had introduced long time before, but
they argue that the experience element has become so important that it deserves its own
paradigm of understanding, which should be separated from the service paradigm.
Their argument for this is economic. They emphasize not only the psychological or
sociological aspects of value, but also the economic: people are willing to pay a higher
price for the experience element. Goods and services with experience added are sold to a
higher price and produce more profit for the selling firm. In Pine and Gilmores, and the
following theorists (Jensen, 1999; Sundbo and Srensen, 2013) understanding, the
experience element is not particularly connected to a service. The service notion is
therefore not a core concept in understanding current economic growth and marketing.
This becomes a showdown with the service dominant logic, which, it is claimed, should
be replaced by an experience dominant logic as propounded by Pine and Gilmore (1999).
This pronounced view has contributed to putting experience on the agenda.
The experience economy perspective goes further and sees experience as a product
area in itself in line with goods and services. Arguments and analyses (Pine and
Gilmore, 1999, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2001; Erhvervs- og
byggestyrelsen, 2008; Sundbo and Darmer, 2008) point to an experience sector that can
be defined in the economy along with a manufacturing, a service and a primary
(agriculture, fishing, mining, etc.) sector. The experience sector is argued to be the most
profitable and most rapidly growing sector. Thus, producing and selling experiences are
the interesting things to understand per se, and not only experience as a marketing
means to sell goods and services. This view may move the focus from services to
experience in industrial policy and in firms development strategies.
Experience as a phenomenon that people consume in its own right is not a new idea.
Experience has long since been used as a concept to explain peoples consumption of, for
example, culture and education (Dewey, 1929, 1934, 1938; Valberg, 1992). Mostly,
experience production has been studied and understood under notions such as culture,
tourism, leisure and so forth. However, the experience marketing movement described
above has emphasized these economic activity areas as market-based profit and growth
areas, whereas previously they had mainly been seen as societal costs (e.g. cultural
activities as paid by governments or municipalities). This has contributed to an
emphasis on the experience economy perspective. Current economic and sociological

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analyses of the experience economy are not all made under the headline of the experience
economy, but often under headlines such as the creative industries.
Experience has also been brought on the agenda because of a societal interest in
economic growth and job creation. The emphasis on the experience economy has
pointed to it as a potential growth area that was not seen as such earlier. This has further
led to awareness of experience elements as add-ons that can create economic growth in
other sectors (both the primary, the manufacturing and the service sectors).

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3. What is experience?
To continue this discussion, we need to find out what experience really is.
3.1 Definition of experience
No authorized definition of experience exists. Mostly, experience is defined as a mental
phenomenon. An experience is something that happens in peoples minds the memory
of a kind of mental journey (Sundbo, 2009). Some authors state that experiencing is
determined by external stimuli and elaborated via the mental awareness that people
have from earlier experiences, mental needs (such as self-realization, un-stressing,
avoiding everyday life through escapism and so on) (Jantzen, 2013). The external stimuli
can be physical (such as a painting or a special car), behavioural (such as practicing
sport or a service delivery), sound and light (such as a concert), interactive (such as a
festival or being together with friends) and so forth. All five senses can create an
experience. Some theorists even understand experience as a physical-biological
phenomenon in a neurosensoric framework (Jantzen and Vetner, 2007).
Csikszentmihalyi (2002) connects experience to flow, which is a feeling one gets when
one carries out a certain activity, when one is fully absorbed by that activity. This is a
very narrow definition of experience. Passive non-intended observation of a physical
phenomenon (e.g. architecture) can also be an experience even though it does not give
flow. Pine and Gilmore (1999) do not define the concept very formally, but use a theatre
metaphor talking about staging your business.
Experiences can be of different kind, entertaining, escapist, learning; they can be
received passively and actively; they can be created on the distance by technology (e.g.
experiences on the Internet or Facebook) or in interaction between the stimuli provider
and the receiver. Experience can be positive or joyful (according to social norms) such as
entertainment and sports activities and an experience can be negative or sad such as
going to a funeral. The important factor is not whether it is positive or sad, but whether
it is memorable. This view implies that, for example, sales will not necessarily increase
by connecting a service to an experience; a sad experience will decrease sales. The
problem of course is that the interpretation of experiences is individual, thus what is
positive to one person may be negative to another, what is an exciting experience to one
can be boring to another and so forth.
Many external stimuli can create an experience and, thus, a memory. Service delivery
is far from the only external stimuli that can create an experience; in fact, it is not among
the phenomena that traditionally have been considered experience-creating ones.
3.2 Are experiences only emotional?
The marketing tradition that emphasizes experience in customer relations often sees
experiences as emotional (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Pullman and Gross, 2004),
hedonic (Kristensen, 1984; Hopkinson and Pujari, 1999; Irani and Hanzaee, 2011) or

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sensoric (Hulten et al., 2009). This is seen in contrast to the more rational buying
decisions where the consumer has a practical problem that can be solved by purchasing
a good or a service, that is, the customer decides his purchase via rational intellectual
consideration of which good or service can solve his problem best and cheapest. The
experience marketing approach emphasizes experience as the emotions that are
awakened by a certain marketing stimuli which make the consumer to buy a product or
service that he maybe does not really need, or buy a more expensive one.
Experiencing is a sensory process, but is it only emotional? This may not be so clear.
First, one may discuss the question as to what is emotional. Is the experience process
unconscious for the experiencing individual? If it is, can in be explained by physical,
neurophysiological reactions (like Pavlov, 1960). Or should the experience be
understood as something spiritual that cannot be explained by neurophysiological
laws? If we accept the definition of experience as what is memorized, is the memorization
an unconscious process driven by emotions? One may argue that it might be so, but
the memorization may also be determined by conscious, analytical, intellectual
considerations of beforehand-oriented interests that select which stimuli to store and
how to elaborate these stimuli. Experiencing can be a quite conscious, interest-based
process. In such cases, it is difficult to cheat the potential customer by exposing her to
emotional elements, but the provider may influence her interest framework. Nor are
experiences always hedonic.
The issue becomes complicated by the fact that experience has two aspects, which in
languages other than English are characterized by two different words. Experience can
mean learning (erfahrung in German, erfaring in Danish) and it can mean enjoyment
(erlebnis in German; it would be called oplevelse in everyday Danish language).
Experience is in the experience literature (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Snel, 2013) conceived
as something that can both be learning and entertaining. The first leads to the rational
aspect of purchasing decisions you can learn to buy more effective (i.e. goods, services,
experience products that fulfil your needs better to a lower price) next time. The latter
leads to the emotional aspect one buys things, services or experience products that one
does not really need or which are more expensive than they need to be. This distinction
has been discussed in the marketing and service literature as rational-emotional.
The above discussion leads to a distinction between instrumental and expressive
behaviour, a pair of concepts known from sociology (Parsons, 1951). These are
useful in obtaining a more nuanced discussion of the issue of service marketing and
experience. One may start a theoretical discussion by stating that services are
instrumental by nature and definition. Services must solve problems; these
problems may be of practical nature (and are solved by manual services), of
intellectual nature (and are solved by knowledge services) or of personal nature (and
are solved by personal services). Experiences and experience products are
expressive by nature. Now, we have separated and defined service and experience
products (cf. Sundbo, 2015). This is theoretically simple and clear. However, if we
look at the literature, it is unfortunately not that clear.
The experience economy literature talks about the learning, or erfahrung aspects of
experiencing (particularly Snel, 2011; but also Boswijk et al., 2007). Pine and Gilmore
(1999) talk about experiencing as meaning-creating or sense-making (cf. Weick, 1995). In
their book on the experience economy, they already predict that experiences are sought
to satisfy needs for behaving charitably and ethically to find a meaning of life in an

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existentialistic or Kierkegaardian (Kierkegaard, 1959) sense; they call this the

transformation economy. Both views indicate that experiencing is not only expressive
but also potentially instrumental, that is, an experience is sought to lead to a better
understanding of aspects of life or a better moral attitude and behaviour.
4. Service marketing and experience
As mentioned, service marketing literature has brought experience on the agenda.
However, how did that happen and what does experience mean within the service
marketing theory? This will be discussed in this section.
4.1 From service quality to customer service experience
How did it happen? The service management and marketing literature has gone from a
focus on operation, industrialization and quality understood as operational quality (zero
failures, Deming, 1986) (Levitt, 1972) to a focus on customer relations (Gummesson,
1994). The particular interpersonal customer relations have been seen as characterizing
service deliveries. It has been argued that the customer must be present at the moment
of production. This has become the basis for a particular service marketing paradigm
starting with Eiglier and Langeard (1988), further developed by American researchers
(Shostack, 1977; Zeithaml et al., 1990) and the so-called Nordic school (Gummesson,
1994; Grnroos, 2000). The paradigm has been claimed to be a general marketing
approach valid for all business sectors and has been re-introduced several times under
different headings such as service dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2006). The
particular personal service marketing aspect started at a certain time emphasized a
discourse of service quality (Brown et al., 1991; Edvardsson et al., 1994), which stressed
the customers evaluation of the service delivery. This service quality is determined by
the service product itself, by peripheral services and the way the service firm delivers
(e.g. the behaviour and attitude of the employees, the service firms willingness to be
flexible, etc.).
It was during the further development of the service quality perspective that the
emphasis on customer experience was introduced. Experience has been used as a
concept to describe the customers impression of the functional part of the service
delivery or service quality as normally being subjective (even though it in principle
can be objectively measured). Further, the peripheral services and the delivery process
may create emotional feelings in the customer outside the functional solution of the
problem (Grnroos, 2000). This aspect has led to an emphasis on expressive customer
experiences (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). As the literature increasingly has talked
about this emotional customer service experience, it has decreasingly talked about
service quality.
4.2 The experience notion in service marketing literature
What does experience mean within service marketing theory? The service marketing
literature uses the word experience, in an expressive way too, largely to characterize
customer reactions to service deliveries. Experience is used in the literature to
characterize customers reactions to service deliveries (Helkkula, 2010). However, most
often, authors do not specify whether they mean the rational, or instrumental, aspects of
a service delivery, erfahrung did the customer observe that the service solved his
problem? Or whether the authors mean the expressive, or emotional, aspect, erlebnis
did the customer memorize events that made him think that this service delivery was

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funny, interesting, pleasant, perhaps meaning-giving, or had other remarkable

emotional aspects? However, there is no doubt of some authors, and the research results
focus on the expressive (or even more extremely on hedonic) aspects and, therefore,
overlap with the pure experience approaches (cf. Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Boswijk et al.,
2007; Mossberg, 2007; Sundbo and Srensen, 2013). The experience and the service
paradigms are not completely separated.
The route from service quality to customer experience marketing within the
service theory has changed the focus from operational issues such as operational
problems (Hope and Mhlemann, 1997), industrialization and mass production
(Levitt, 1972), HRM (Carlzon, 1985), modulization (Sundbo, 1994) and quantitative
quality measurement (e.g. the once popular SERVQUAL measuring scale, Zeithaml
et al., 1996) to managers and employees interaction with customers. The customers
have increasingly been seen as active co-producers of services, and the research interest
has moved towards understanding customers psychological and experiential reactions and
needs. Expressions such as co-creation and customer involvement have become
widespread (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Edvardsson et al., 2005).
The particular use of the notion of experience has in fact been a building stone in the
bridge, leading out of the service paradigm. It has demonstrated the perspectives in
considering the experience as the core of an understanding of what mostly drives people
and what creates value for customers. If it is the experience aspect that creates more
economic and subjective, perceived value per unit service, it is the experience aspect that
is interesting, not the service aspect. Therefore, the theory that explains the experience
is interesting and not one that explains the service. The way towards a new experience
economy paradigm that can replace the old service management and marketing
paradigm is opened. It is precisely here the Pine and Gilmores theory was introduced (cf.
Pine and Gilmore, 1999).
5. Where are we now? An explanatory model
5.1 Where are we now?
This theoretical situation can seem confusing. The situation might be characterized as a
paradigmatic revolutionary one (cf. Kuhn, 1970). A new paradigm, the experience
economy, challenges the old paradigm, the service marketing one, which answers by
increasingly emphasizing its fundamental theoretical assumptions, methods and
scientific norms. The service marketing statements of co-creation, customer relations
and so forth have been repeated in articles and books, maybe without many fundamental
scientific findings being produced. This characterizes a mature paradigm the fundamental
discoveries have been done.
On the other hand, is the experience economy paradigm still struggling with
formulating its basis (cf. Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Boswijk et al., 2007; Sundbo and
Darmer, 2008; Sundbo and Srensen, 2013) and what really loosens it from the service
marketing theories emphasis on emotions, customer experiences and hedonic needs?
Further, one may argue that it is a vague paradigm that as early as its breakthrough
Pine and Gilmore (1999) launches the next paradigm (as Pine and Gilmore did with their
introduction of the transformation economy in the last chapter of their book on the
experience economy).

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5.2 A new discourse: rational quality and productivity?

Recently, a new aspect has arrived. In the economic crisis, a general turn around in the
society and social sciences towards old industrial issues has arisen. Productivity,
competition capability, technology development and rationalization have become core
issues in all sectors. This development points away from the soft service marketing
issues and maybe also from issues in the experience economy unless science can prove
that there is economic and job growth in experiences. This tendency, which could be
called an industrialization tendency (i.e. focus on productivity, costs and technology),
has been addressed within service research in the German and American attempt to
create a more engineering-oriented service science (Hefley and Murphy, 2008; Stauss
et al., 2008). This tendency points to an interest in quality, also service quality, in the
rational, instrumental meaning. Services, as other products including experience
products should be standardized, of same technical quality and without failure. This
interest has not been articulated much within service marketing and management or
experience theory, but if we as researchers interact with the firms, the political system
and interest organizations in the society, we may observe that this is contemporarily
their agenda not soft service marketing, vague emotional customer value or unclear
experiencing. An example is Denmark. The greatest public, business and scientific
attention to services has been called to the fore by a government commission of
economists who published a report (Produktivitetskommissionen, 2013) that showed
that productivity increase has been lowest in the service sector of all sectors. Societal
interest may already be found in research approaches and issues, maybe not within
marketing or HRM disciplines, but within economics disciplines which has taken over
much of the service agenda in the public discussion of services and experience.
5.3 A model of explanation
How can we express what is going on and where the service science and experience
sciences are going? One possibility is to create a model that classifies the theoretical
tendencies and how they change. Such a model is not the whole truth, but it might bring
some understanding. The model presented here is an attempt to analyse the theoretical
changes. After having done this, some suggestions for explaining why the theoretical
and scientific focus is changing are presented. It will include a discussion of which
factors drive those changes.
The change in theoretical interests could be expressed in a four-square table a
traditionally popular tool in social sciences. This is done in Table I. This table is the
framework for explaining the development in the theoretical interest and, thus, in itself
expression of a theoretical viewpoint. The table includes the changes described above.
The framework has two dimensions. One is service and experience as the discoursive
disciplinary fields discussed above. The other is the dimension instrumental and
expressive, as the characteristic of what service and/or experience deliveries mean to
consumers. The scientific focus points discussed above are placed in the cells. Further,
the theories main factors (what the theories emphasize as the main object to study and
improve) are stated. This is of course a meta-theoretical interpretation that can be useful
or criticized as such models always can, simply because one selects aspects of varied
reality (in this case theories).
The table expresses the following changes (marked by numbers in the table cells): the
theoretical interest started with emphasis on service operations, which were

From service
quality to
experience

The disciplinary discourse

Experience

Service
Consumer meaning
(Combined price/function
quality
5)
Instrumental

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Expressive

Service products
Functional quality

Service marketing
Emotions

Experience learning
products
Ethical

Experience products
Hedonic

instrumental means to solve concrete problems (1). Via the idea of service quality, the
interest developed into a service marketing approach that emphasized customer
emotions (2). The experience economy paradigm moved from that into its own
paradigm, emphasizing consumers experiences as a particular product area. In the
beginning, the emphasis was on hedonic products (music, entertainment, fun on the
Internet, etc.) (3). Later, the experience focus moved to more learning, meaning-creating
purposes where experiencing is a means to achieve learning and existential meaning;
experiences become instrumental (4).
In the current situation, it may be considered as done above whether the research
and theory focus is, or will, turn back towards hard-core price-focus and functional
quality aspects of the combined products: material aspects (good), instrumental
problem-solving aspects (service) and expressive aspects (experience) (5). This is
illustrated in the model by the dotted arrow. This possible contemporary change can not
necessarily be characterized as a move back to the service discourse. The current focus
on productivity, technology and cost competition is common for all economic sectors.
One may suggest that this leads to a view of goods, services experiences and even
primary products (such as fish, game, metal) as combined (such as in Sundbo, 2015).
Customers see products as the unity of material structures (goods), problem-solving
activities (service) and experiences. The categories service and experience in the
upper part of the table may be replaced by a new notion, which we not yet know. These
combined products will be differentiated; some will be tailor made as the old service
products, but most will be standardized or modulized, mass produced and mass
marketed globally via IT-networks where the customer relation will not be as directly
personally interactive as assumed in the traditional service marketing theories.
Technology, particularly IT, will be important, also for service and experience
production and delivery. Each combined product has both instrumental and expressive
elements, however, in varied degrees. A new focus on quality, although it might not be
termed quality, will most likely emphasize all the aspects of quality functional as well
as experienced. The subjectively perceived service quality that service marketing
theory has emphasized (Grnroos 2000) will still be a factor in consumption, but
supplemented with objectively measurable functional qualities and prices comparisons
and studies of technologys role. Productivity increase that leads to lower prices will be
emphasized, also by consumers, as much as perceived customer experience.

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Table I.
Changes in service
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This theory movement might be explained by the movement in interest that industry
has had, as they observe old markets becoming mature and opening new markets
requires innovation, not only in products, but also in business models (which may be
reflected in all the cells [1-5] of the table). This movement is paired with scientists drive
to be original and find new explanations and prescriptions. One may, here, again
emphasize economists and engineers recent emergence on the service science scene
that has been dominated by marketing researchers.
6. Conclusion
In the past 30 years, there has been a change in the theoretical understanding of service,
quality and experiences. This change has perhaps led us back to the point of departure,
namely, functional quality. But it will most likely be in a new version. We have not yet
seen this, but a suggestion is that it will be theory which focuses on standardized, or
modulized, often technology-based, combined products which provide people material
things, problem-solving, emotional experiences and a meaning with the life. Consumers
will probably still pay much money for special combination products, but the price will
most likely come back as an important competition parameter. Or put in another way:
economic and engineering views will be more prominent on the agenda.
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About the author
Jon Sundbo is a Professor of Business Administration and Innovation at Roskilde University,
Denmark. He has throughout his whole career been doing research in innovation and
entrepreneurship, experience economy, tourism and services and has published articles and books
(including The Theory of Innovation and Handbook on the Experience Economy) about these
topics. Prof Jon Sundbo can be contacted at: sundbo@ruc.dk

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