Enhancement of tourism service delivery performance through value co-creation: A system dynamic approach : Case Study: Cultural heritage sector in Sicily

Abstract: Value co-creation is shown to play a prominent role in performance improvement in various sectors ranging from manufacturing to service. However, its role in creating value and consequently improving the performance of service in tourist sector has not been investigated in the literature. In order to bridge this gap, this thesis builds models aiming at developing a tourism engagement based value co-creation mechanism. It targets to improve cultural heritage sector performance in terms of service delivery system. Considering a specific case study, Sicily in Southern Italy, the developed models intend to address the tourist’s service delivery experience design. Moreover, we aim to realize the potential problems and clearly understand the relations of causal factors within the cultural heritage sector through engaging tourists and private sector. This engagement is basically governed through getting feedback and ideas from tourists. The modelling tool used is system dynamics (SD). SD has been widely used in various fields where there are complex relationships and interactions among various actors, which are hard to analyse. Proven to be a powerful tool in analysing dynamic systems, we also employ this methodology for our analysis. Although system dynamics has been applied to a wide range of problem domains, using it in co-creating value within service delivery design especially in tourism sector is relatively new and is considered one of the main scientific contributions of this study. One of the main advantages of SD is that it provides us with the opportunity to analyse the impacts and consequences of different policies and also the sensitivity of the system to these policies and parameters of the problem. In other words, this remarkably helps policy makers and service providers to mainly avoid the failures of policies and standards and strive for applying more efficient policies. The benefits of using this approach in the tourist sector are twofold. On the one hand it would lead to more satisfied tourists and on the other hand governmental and non-governmental financial resources would be allocated to the different part of the service supply chain more effectively. Given the current economic situation of Italy and its facing scarce financial resources, we need to be extremely careful to consume those resources in an effective and efficient manner. Having this in mind, our models formulate various policies that give different priorities to investment options in various areas within tourism sector including IT, human resource, infrastructure and HR skills. Using the SD simulation models we can analyse the impacts of these policies and based on the output of the models make recommendation. The main result of this thesis suggests that incorporating a value co-creation through engagement of tourists, ideation, would enable policy maker to stay in line with tourists needs and invest in accordance with their wants which leads to significant improvement in quality of the service offered to tourists. By way of the results of implementing different policies, proves that the first policy which exactly has been set in line with tourist needs is the most influential one.