Shang Gao
email: shanggao@idi.ntnu.no

Yuhao Yang

The Role of Trust towards the Adoption of Mobile Services in China: An Empirical Study

Keywords: Mobile Services, Trust, Technology Acceptance Model, Technology Adoption

This research aims to study the role of trust towards the adoption of mobile services in China. This study examined users' adoption of general mobile services by extending TAM with additional trust-related constructs. Based on the literature review from previous research, a research model with 10 research hypotheses is proposed in the study. This research model is empirically evaluated using survey data collected from a sample of 373 subjects. Seven research hypotheses are positively significant supported, while three research hypotheses are rejected in this study. The results indicate that both perceived reputation and perceived structural assurance directly affects the consumers' trust in mobile services. However, perceived environment risk does not have positive effect on consumers' trust in mobile services. Another interesting finding is that consumers' trust in mobile services does not have direct positive effect on users' intention to use mobile services.

Introduction

Along with the popularity of mobile devices and advances in wireless technology, mobile services have become more and more prevalent. Despite the rapid global diffusion of mobile devices, some mobile services have experienced much slower uptake from consumers [START_REF] Gao | Adoption of mobile information services: An empirical study[END_REF]. A mobile service is a term used to describe software that runs on a mobile device. Mobile services are designed to educate, entertain, and assist users in their daily lives.

While there has been an increasing availability of mobile services, limited attention has been given to user adoption of mobile services, particularly with newly developed advanced mobile services (e.g., advanced mobile services). Prevalence of mobile services depends not only on technology advancement, but also on user adoption. Most research about the adoption of mobile services was mainly based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) (e.g., [9, 19, 28, 38] [21]). Some previous research (e.g., [START_REF] Dahlberg | Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review[END_REF][START_REF] Gao | Developing an instrument to measure the adoption of mobile services[END_REF]) indicated that traditional adoption theories (e.g., TAM) failed to explain the adoption of mobile services. It is believed that current research has some limitations in explaining consumers' trust in mobile services and their feelings attached to using them. Therefore, we believe that there is a need to include the trust element into the mobile services adoption research. The problem that we want to address in this research is to investigate the role of trust towards the adoption of mobile services in terms of a research model.

Based on analysis of prior literature on technology diffusion and trust, a research model is developed to investigate the adoption of mobile services. To operationalize the research model, a measurement instrument is used to measure each of the constructs. The objective of this paper is to empirically examine how well the proposed research model is able to explain mobile services adoption. The research model is analyzed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: the literature review is provided in Section 2. The research model and hypotheses are presented in Section 3. The method and process of our empirical study are described in Section 4. This is followed by a discussion of the findings and limitations of this study in Section 5. Section 6 concludes this research and suggests directions for future research.

Literature Review

The literature about technology adoption and trust is discussed in this section.

Technology Adoption Research

An important and long-standing research question in information systems research is how we can accurately explain user adoption of information systems [START_REF] Delone | Information Systems Success: The Quest for the Dependent Variable[END_REF]. Several models have been developed to test the users' attitude and intention to adopt new technologies or information systems. These models include the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) [START_REF] Davis | Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user acceptance of information technology[END_REF], Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) [START_REF] Ajzen | The theory of planned behavior[END_REF], Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) [START_REF] Rogers | The diffusion of innovations[END_REF], Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) [START_REF] Venkatesh | User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward a Unified View[END_REF]. Among the different models that have been proposed, TAM, which is the extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) [START_REF] Fishbein | Belief, Attitude, Intention and Behavior: An Introduction to Theory and Research[END_REF], appears to be the most widely accepted model. TAM focus on the perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of a system and has been tested in some domains of E-business and proved to be quite reliable to predict user acceptance of some new information technologies, such as intranet [START_REF] Horton | Explaining intranet use with the technology acceptance model[END_REF], electronic commerce [START_REF] Pavlou | Consumer Acceptance of Electronic Commerce: Integrating Trust and Risk with the Technology Acceptance Model[END_REF], and online shopping [START_REF] Gefen | TAM or Just Plain Habit: A Look at Experienced. Online Shoppers[END_REF].

However, TAM's limitations relative to extensibility and explanation power have been noted [START_REF] Benbasat | Quo Vadis TAM[END_REF]. Many researchers have suggested that TAM needs to be extended with additional variables to provide a stronger model [START_REF] Legris | Why do people use information technology?: a critical review of the technology acceptance model[END_REF]. Some researchers have also indicated that the major constructs of TAM cannot fully reflect the specific influences of technological and usage-context factors that may alter users' acceptance [START_REF] Moon | Extending the TAM for a World-Wide-Web context[END_REF]. Therefore, PU and PEOU may not fully explain people's intention to adopt mobile services. We believe that TAM has limitations when investigating users' adoption of mobile services, which is also confirmed by prior research work in [START_REF] Wu | What drives mobile commerce? An empirical evaluation of the revised technology acceptance model[END_REF]. Moreover, although UTAUT unifies more factors and consolidates the functions of the technology acceptance model with the constructs of eight prominent models in IS adoption research, this increases the complexity, so that it is more complicated to test its applicability. While the acceptance and adoption of IT services has been one of the most prevailing IS research topics (e.g., [START_REF] Davis | User acceptance of computer technology: a comparison of two theoretical models[END_REF]), the pervasiveness of mobile services raises new questions in exploring the adoption of mobiles services, such as what are the key factors driving the adoption of mobile services, and how do usage context affect users' adoption of mobile services.

All the findings above motivate the development of a research model, which is described in next section.

The role of trust in mobile services

Trust is a crucial enabling factor in relations where there is uncertainty, interdependence, risk, and fear of opportunism [START_REF] Mayer | An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust[END_REF]. For example, because of the absence of proven guarantees that the mobile services providers will not engage in harmful opportunistic behaviors, such as privacy violations and unauthorized use of credit card information, some users generally stay away from mobile services providers they do not trust.

In the domain of mobile services, trust can be defined as a user's belief or faith in the degree to which a specific service can be regarded to have no security and privacy threats [START_REF] Gao | Mobile Services Acceptance Model[END_REF]. In other words, trust means believing in mobile services now with an expectation that it will be risk free and you will be getting intangible benefits in certain ways at an unspecific time in the future. For mobile services providers, cultivating users' trust is a time-consuming process. Trust is hard to gain, but easy to lose.

Several factors can influence users' trust in mobile services. First, many users are not familiar with mobile services and mobile technology. Second, unfamiliarity with mobile services providers may make users' perception on the activities involved in mobile services as risky. For example, the lack of physical presentation of the service providers and the inability to feel and inspect the desired real products in a mobile transaction may make users feel vulnerable. Third, mobile services are also confronted with other challenges (e.g., privacy and security issues). Most users are concerned about the security of mobile services and mobile services providers' ability to protect unauthorized access to personal information. As indicated in [START_REF] Hoffman | Building consumer trust online[END_REF], security and privacy issues are critical to the success of consumers' trust building in Internet shopping. We believe that this principle can apply to mobile services as well. Compared to traditional electronic services, users tend to perceive mobile services as riskier in nature and are more reluctant to adopt them. Fourth, corporate branding and reputation could be used to engender trust in mobile services. Last but not least, legislations and governmental policies on mobile services may also affect users' trust in mobile services.

Trust in Technology Adoption Research

Trust is defined as the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the latter one will perform particular actions [START_REF] Mayer | An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust[END_REF].

After having identified the concept of trust as a key success factor in e-commerce [START_REF] Mcknight | What trust means in e-commerce customer relationships: an interdisciplinary conceptual typology[END_REF], it makes trust become a much concerned forefront direction in the area of acceptance research. Bélanger explored trust in e-government services [START_REF] Bélanger | Trust and risk in e-government adoption[END_REF] and Gefen et al. studied the role of trust in online shopping [START_REF] Gefen | Trust and TAM in Online Shopping: An Integrated Model[END_REF]. Further, Watzdorf et al. found that the impact of trust on intention to use is insignificant in mobile emergency applications [START_REF] Von Watzdorf | The Influence of Provider Trust on the Acceptance of Mobile Applications: An Empirical Analysis of Two Mobile Emergency Applications[END_REF]. Last but not least, Chandra illustrated that building sufficient trust in mobile payment system is imperative for its adoption [START_REF] Chandra | Evaluating the role of trust in consumer adoption of mobile payment systems: An empirical analysis[END_REF]. The difference in results probably attributes to different samples and objects. In this research, we would like to further explore the importance of trust towards mobile services adoption in China.

Research Model and Hypotheses

This study examines the acceptance of general mobile services in China. The proposed research model (see Figure 1) is an extension of TAM. In addition to perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, the model includes trust related elements as additional factors to study the relating to user adoption of mobile services.

This study is based on a model [START_REF] Chandra | Evaluating the role of trust in consumer adoption of mobile payment systems: An empirical analysis[END_REF] which focused on consumers' adoption of Mobile payment. Chandra's model is an extension of TAM model, and the model included the perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), adoption intention of M-Payment system (AI). In addition to that the model indicated a positive influence of PU on AI and PEOU on PU, the influence of PEOU on AI is insignificant. In our research, we still want to confirm the influence of PEOU on AI as we change the research target into Chinese and research subject into mobile services, thus we formulate the following research hypotheses.

H1a: The perceived usefulness has a positive impact on the intention to use mobile services.

H1b: The perceived ease of use has a positive impact on the intention to use mobile services.

H1c: The perceived ease of use has a positive impact on the perceived usefulness. As proposed in [START_REF] Chandra | Evaluating the role of trust in consumer adoption of mobile payment systems: An empirical analysis[END_REF], the two dimensions of consumer trust are trust in mobile service provider and trust in technology facilitated by mobile service provider characteristics and mobile technology characteristics respectively. Perceived reputation (PR) of the mobile services provider is identified a major category of trust in mobile services provider. Perceived environment risk (PER) and perceived structural assurance (PSA) are identified another two categories of trust in technology facilitated. Then, we modulate these three variables to our research model.

Perceived reputation (PR): The extent to which consumers believe in the mobile services provider's competency, honesty, and benevolence [START_REF] Doney | An Examination of the Nature of Trust in Buyer-Seller Relationships[END_REF].

Perceived environment risk (PER): Security-related risks faced by consumers while using mobile services, including privacy risk, financial risk [START_REF] Aldridge | Security considerations of doing business via the Internet: cautions to be considered[END_REF].

Perceived structural assurance (PSA): The institutional environment (here mobile technology including the mobile Internet and mobile platform) that all structures like guarantees, regulations, and promises are operational for safe, secure, and reliable services [START_REF] Zucker | Production of trust: Institutional sources of economic structure, 1840-1920[END_REF].

Hence, we formulate the following hypotheses.

H2: Perceived reputation of the mobile services provider has a positive impact on the level of consumer trust in mobile services.

H3a: Perceived environment risk has a negative impact on the level of consumer trust in mobile services.

H3b: Perceived structural assurance has a positive impact on the level of consumer trust in mobile services.

H3c: Perceived structural assurance has a negative impact on the Perceived environment risk in mobile services.

H4a: Consume trust in mobile services has a positive impact on the perceived usefulness of mobile services.

H4b: Consume trust in mobile services has a positive impact on the perceived ease of use of mobile services.

H4c: Consume trust in mobile services has a positive impact on the intention to use mobile services.

An Empirical Study with the Research Model

In this research, the research model was examined through the use of general mobile services in China.

Mobile Commerce in China

According to the report from the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, the number of mobile phone subscribers in China exceeded 1 billion in March 2012 as more Chinese people began to consider mobile phones as an everyday necessity. China has the largest mobile phone market in the world. However, the mainstream usage of mobile phones in China focuses on phone calls, SMS, instant messaging services, contact services, and purchasing ring tongs [START_REF] Gao | A study on distribution methods of mobile applications in China[END_REF]. Social networking services on mobile devices are becoming more and more popular in young generation in China. However, not many researches are focused on the adoption of mobile services in China. Therefore, we believe that it is still worth to develop a research model to measure the adoption of mobile services in China.

Instrument Development

The validated instrument items [2, 39] [11, 18] [12] from previous research were used as the foundation to create the instrument for this study. Developed from the literature, the measurement questionnaire consisted of 24 items. In order to ensure that the instrument better fit this empirical study, some minor words changes were made to ensure easy interpretation and comprehension of the questions. A seven point Likert scale, with 1 being the negative end of the scale (strongly disagree) and 7 being the positive end of the scale (strongly agree), was used to examine participants' responses to all items in this part.

Samples

The data for this study were collected through self-administered questionnaires by inhabitants of the biggest city in the central part of China. The survey was distributed in terms of paper-based questionnaires individually from January 1st 2014 to March 15, 2014. 435 completed questionnaires were collected, among which 373 of them were valid questionnaires (i.e., valid respondent rate 85.7%). Among the participants, 66.2%of the participants used Android mobile devices, and 22.3% of the participants used iPhones. 41% of the participants were male, and 59% were female. Moreover, 52.1% of the participants were below 22 years old.

Measurement Model

To test the reliability and validity of each construct in the mobile service acceptance model, the Internal Consistency of Reliability (ICR) of each construct was tested with Cronbach's Alpha coefficient. For the purposes of testing the research hypotheses, data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling (SEM).

In this study, we examined goodness-of-fit of the measurement model by using six widely-used fit indices: the chi-square/degrees of freedom (x2/df), the goodness-of-fit index (GFI), the adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI), the comparative fit index (CFI), the normed fit index (NFI), and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). The fitness measures are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 shows that all the fitness measures are within acceptable range. Therefore, we consider the measurement model is acceptable, and the measures indicate that the model fit the data.

Convergent validity was assessed through composite reliability (CR) and the average variance extracted (AVE). Bagozzi and Yi [START_REF] Bagozzi | Specification, evaluation, and interpretation of structural equation models[END_REF] proposed the following three measurement criteria: factor loadings for all items should exceed 0.5, the CR should exceed 0.7, and the AVE of each construct should exceed 0.5. As shown in Table 2, all constructs are in acceptable ranges except the construct perceived environmental risk (PER). Further, the Cronbach's Alpha values range from 0.732 to 0.887. All the constructs are above 0.700. Consequently, the scales are deemed acceptable to continue. As for discriminant validity, the variances extracted by the constructs are more than the squared correlations among variables.

Structural Model and Hypotheses Testing

The structural model was tested using Amos 20.0. The results of the structural model are shown in Figure . 2. The R 2 (R square) in Figure 2 denotes to coefficient of determination. It provides a measure of how well future outcomes are likely to be predicted by the model, the amount of variability of a given construct. In our analysis, the R 2 coefficient of determination is a statistical measure of how well the regression coefficients approximate the real data point. The standardized path coefficients between constructs are presented, while the dotted lines stand for the non-significant paths. Table 3 presents the path coefficients, which are standardized regression coefficients. As a result, seven hypotheses were supported.

Discussion

In this research, we studied the acceptance of mobile services in China. And the role of trust played in this process was examined. This research was considered to be beneficial for academic research since it extends and enhances the understanding of adoption and mobile services in China. The findings demonstrated the appropriateness of the research model and hypotheses for measuring mobile services adoption. The positive impact of perceived reputation on trust was significant. Among the numerous services, providers with good reputation can decrease the perceived vulnerability of users and a good impression based on previous experience can encourage the users to make an attempt to new services from the providers. This result is consistent with previous technology adoption studies in online shopping [START_REF] Gefen | TAM or Just Plain Habit: A Look at Experienced. Online Shoppers[END_REF][START_REF] Gefen | Trust and TAM in Online Shopping: An Integrated Model[END_REF]. For those providers with successful services before, they have more advantages in new services promotion than other market entrants.

The other factor, which has a positive influence on trust, was perceived structure assurance, which refers to mobile Internet and operating platform technologies here. Due to a safety structure assurance, users believed that they would not suffer attack and potential loss from hackers, and they would be compensated if that happened [START_REF] Aldridge | Security considerations of doing business via the Internet: cautions to be considered[END_REF].

However, perceived environment risk does not have positive effect on consumers' trust in mobile services. According to the descriptive results, perceived environment risk has an average value of 5.13 on a seven point Likert scale. But the influence of perceived environment risk on users' trust was insignificant. The possible explanation might be that users are confidence with their qualified skills to avoid fraud services, and the mobile service has some schemes to protect users' security and privacy issues. Trust has both positive influence on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness significantly.

Further, another interesting finding of this study was that trust did not have direct positive effect on the intention to use mobile services. This is contradictory with some previous research (e.g., [START_REF] Ajzen | The theory of planned behavior[END_REF][START_REF] Hayduk | Structural equation modeling with LISREL: Essentials and advances[END_REF]). As our research aimed to investigate users' adoption of general mobile services in China, the results may vary from a specific mobile service to another mobile service. The research results also confirmed the positive influence of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on the intention to use mobile services. It revealed the importance of ease of use and usefulness of mobile services toward users' adoption of mobile services. However, we were also aware of some limitations. Firstly, we only tested the research model and research hypotheses with general mobile services in China. Therefore, the generalizability of the results to a specific mobile service remains to be determined. Secondly, the subjects in this study were mainly university students. This sample may not be fully representative of the entire population in China.

Conclusion and Future Research

This research was designed to study the role of trust towards the adoption of mobile services in China. To our best knowledge, only a few studies were concerned with identifying trust-related factors that affect the adoption of mobile services in China. This study examined users' adoption with general mobile services by extending TAM with additional trust-related constructs. A research model with 10 research hypotheses was proposed in the study. Seven research hypotheses were positively significant supported, while three research hypotheses were rejected in this study. The results indicated that both perceived reputation and perceived structural assurance directly affects the consumers' trust in mobile services. But, consumers' trust in mobile services does not have direct positive effect on user's intention to use mobile services.

Continuing with this stream of research, we plan to examine the applicability of the research model with a specific mobile service, such as mobile information service or mobile payment. Future research is also needed to empirically verify the research model with larger samples across the world. Furthermore, some mediating factors (e.g., gender) may provide fresh insights and offer new directions for future research.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Research Model

Table 1 .

 1 Fit indices for the measurement model

	Measures	Recommended	Measurement	Suggested by
		Criteria	Model	Authors
	Chi-square/d.f.	<3.0	3.266	Hayduk (1988) [24]
	GFI	>0.9	0.844	Scott (1995) [34]
	AGFI	>0.8	0.807	Scott (1995) [34]
	CFI	>0.9	0.893	Bagozzi and Yi (1988)[3]
	NFI	>0.9	0.853	Bentler (1990) [7]
	RMESA	<0.08	0.078	Bagozzi and Yi (1988)[3]

Table 2 .

 2 Factor loadings, composite reliability, and AVE for each construct

	Construct		Item	Factor	Composite	AVE	Cronbach's
				Loading	Reliability		Alpha
	PR		PR1	0.78	0.905	0.761	0.843
			PR2	0.85
			PR3	0.77
	PER		PER1	0.64	0.036	0.218	0.732
			PER2	0.94
			PER3	0.53
	PSA		PSA1	0.82	0.901	0.752	0.832
			PSA2	0.75
			PSA3	0.80
	Trust (TU)		TU1	0.84	0.912	0.725	0.868
			TU2	0.87
			TU3	0.88
			TU4	0.53
	PU		PU1	0.60	0.881	0.713	0.793
			PU2	0.83
			PU3	0.84
	PEOU		PEOU1 0.75	0.917	0.689	0.887
			PEOU2 0.75
			PEOU3 0.76
			PEOU4 0.80
			PEOU5 0.83
	Intention	to	IU1	0.80	0.871	0.694	0.770
	use (IU)		IU2	0.81
			IU3	0.60

Acknowledgement

This research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (Project No. ZNUFE. 2012065).


Yiwei Gong
email: y.gong@tudelft.nl

Marijn Janssen

The Use of Lean Principles in IT Service Innovation: Insights from an Explorative Case Study

Keywords: Service Innovation, Lean, IT Service, IT Outsourcing, Knowledgebased View

IT service innovation is often dependent upon the relationship with outsourcing vendors. In such situations innovation is a result of knowledge accessing and utilization between outsourcing provider and user. As a management thinking, the application of Lean principles can facilitate knowledge accessing and utilization to enable IT service innovation for the customer. Based on the knowledge-based view of the firm, we developed a conceptual framework to describe how Lean can drive IT service innovation within IT outsourcing relationships. This framework is used to analyze the use of Lean principles in an explorative case study of a service organization and its two IT outsourcing providers. The framework and the case study show that IT service innovation is an ongoing process. A clear strategic direction and learning environment are critical to achieve it. Applying Lean principles facilitates the learning behaviors and allows smooth communication on innovative ideas and in this way drive innovation.

Introduction

Along with the growth of the services sector, there is a need for methods to enhance innovation in services within a short time frame. While traditional product innovation emphasizes the design of tangible and relatively static products, services are often intangible and customers are involved in the service delivery process [START_REF] Bitner | Service blueprinting: a practical technique for service innovation[END_REF][START_REF] Oliveira | Users as service innovators: The case of banking services[END_REF]. Grönroos [START_REF] Grönroos | Service Management and Marketing. A customer relationship management approach[END_REF] identified three basic characteristics of services: 1) services are processed using a series of activities (a business process) rather than things, 2) services are to some extent produced and consumed simultaneously, and 3) the customer participates in the service delivery process. Consequently, an approach that can be used to enhance innovativeness in production and manufacturing environments might need to be adapted to the idiosyncratic nature of the services domain [START_REF] Ettlie | Service versus Manufacturing Innovation[END_REF]. We adopt a multi-dimensional definition of service innovation from [START_REF] Hertog | Capabilities for managing service innovation: towards a conceptual framework[END_REF] (p. 494) "A service innovation is a new service experience or service solution that consists of one or several of the following dimensions: new service concept, new customer interaction, new value system/business partners, new revenue model, new organizational or technological service delivery system."

In recent years, Lean has become popular and sometimes even a strategic imperative for organizations to improve their performance. Lean can be used by organizations to turn passive and defensive organizational cultures into proactive and open cultures that promotes organizational learning and innovation [START_REF] Dahlgaard | Lean production, six sigma quality, TQM and company culture[END_REF][START_REF] Johnstone | Creativity, innovation and lean sigma: a controversial combination?[END_REF][START_REF] Bhasin | Performance of organisations treating lean as an ideology[END_REF]. Although Lean has been around for decades, practitioners and scholars primarily applied and studied Lean primarily in manufacturing environments. Because of its apparent success, Lean has gradually expanded itself to other domains such as healthcare [START_REF] Brandao De Souza | Trends and approaches in lean healthcare[END_REF], government [START_REF] Janssen | Lean government and platform-based governance -Doing more with less[END_REF] and the service industries [START_REF] Piercy | Lean transformation in the pure service environment: the case of the call service centre[END_REF][START_REF] Staats | Lean Knowledge Work[END_REF][START_REF] Swank | The lean service machine[END_REF], including IT services [START_REF] Poppendieck | Lean software development: An agile toolkit[END_REF][START_REF] Staats | Lean principles, learning, and knowledge work: Evidence from a software services provider[END_REF]. Despite its broad acceptance it is hardly been applied for innovation.

Innovation in IT services is becoming an increasingly complex issue. On the one hand, IT enables innovation and the adoption of new IT technologies often need to be complemented by organizational change activities [START_REF] Gallouj | Innovation in services: a review of the debate and a research agenda[END_REF]. On the other hand, IT outsourcing is a common practice in the execution and operation of IT services. A key issue in service innovation is therefore the management of the outsourcing relationships and knowledge sharing between organizations [START_REF] Agarwal | Dynamic Capability Building in Service Value Networks for Achieving Service Innovation[END_REF]. Prior innovation approaches (e.g. service blueprinting [START_REF] Bitner | Service blueprinting: a practical technique for service innovation[END_REF]) was used to help organizations improve their service offerings process in the design or implementation stages of services [START_REF] Bettencourt | The secret to true service innovation[END_REF]. A service innovation approach that can address the management of IT outsourcing relationships and knowledge sharing between organizations for its use in IT service context has not yet been reported.

In this paper, we propose a Lean IT service innovation framework based on the knowledge-based view (KBV) of the firm. The framework is then used to analyze an insurance company and the relationships with its two IT outsourcing suppliers. The analyses provide insights of the use of Lean for IT service innovation.

Lean Driven Innovation

Innovation concerns the generation of a new idea and the way to implement it into new product, process or service [START_REF] Urabe | Innovation and the Japanese management system[END_REF]. The earlier literature interprets innovation mainly from a product or process perspective [e.g. [START_REF] Dewar | The adoption of radical and incremental innovations: An empirical analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Rowe | Organizational Innovation: Current Research and Evolving Concepts[END_REF]. While product innovation is about the introduction of new product aiming at satisfying new customer needs, process innovation is concerned with introducing new elements into an organization's operations such as input materials, task specifications, work and information flow mechanisms, and equipment used to provide a product or service [START_REF] Afuah | Innovation management: Strategies, implementation and profits[END_REF]. More recent literature also discusses innovations from administration or management perspectives.

Administrative innovation is the innovation that relates to strategies, structure, systems, or people in the organization [START_REF] Popadiuk | Innovation and knowledge creation: How are these concepts related[END_REF]. Management innovation is defined as the invention and implementation of a management practice, process, structure, or technique that is new to the state of the art and is intended to further organizational goals [START_REF] Birkinshaw | Management Innovation[END_REF].

According to the nature of change, innovation can be classified as incremental or radical [START_REF] Urabe | Innovation and the Japanese management system[END_REF]. Incremental innovations improve existing products or processes within the existing structures and strategies, while radical innovations give rise to revolutionary changes in strategies and structures and even culture [START_REF] Popadiuk | Innovation and knowledge creation: How are these concepts related[END_REF]. A radical innovation is likely to happen in a long time frame and many radical innovations take more than five years before starting to pay back [START_REF] Stamm | Managing Innovation, Design and Creativity[END_REF].

Although innovation has been a subject of scientific research for over a half century, only the last decade scientific literature started to report the connection between Lean and innovation. However, to date the number of publications is still very small. According to Hoppmann, Rebentisch, Dombrowski and Zahn [26 Exhibit 1], up to 2011 only 27 publications can be found about Lean innovation or product development (PD) and half of these publications fall into the PD domain. Existing literature regards Lean driven innovations as either incremental or radical innovations in different forms. In the manufacturing industry Smeds [START_REF] Smeds | Managing Change towards Lean Enterprises[END_REF] argued that the reorganization of manufacturing according to Lean principles can trigger a radical technoorganizational change towards a Lean enterprise which includes a new structure, strategy and culture. Byrne, Lubowe and Blitz [START_REF] Byrne | Using a Lean Six Sigma approach to drive innovation[END_REF] reported on the effect of using Lean Six Sigma management to derive radical innovations. In the research and development (R&D) domain, Schuh, Lenders and Hieber [START_REF] Schuh | Lean Innovation: Introducing Value Systems to Product Development[END_REF] revealed that the implementation of Lean thinking in innovation management facilitates incremental process and product innovations. Besides the manufacturing industry, applying Lean in supporting innovation was found in healthcare and pharmaceutical industry to achieve incremental process innovation [START_REF] Johnstone | Creativity, innovation and lean sigma: a controversial combination?[END_REF][START_REF] Garcia-Porres | Lean Six Sigma applied to a process innovation in a Mexican health institute's imaging department[END_REF].

Knowledge-based View in IT Service Innovation

Lean provides companies a way of working that enables them to introduce and exploit service innovations continuously. Based on KBV, we propose a Lean IT service innovation framework which helps organizations to understand how Lean facilitates service innovation in an IT outsourcing relationship. The KBV considers knowledge as the most strategically significant resource of a firm and the source of competitive advantage resides in the application of the knowledge rather than in the knowledge itself [START_REF] Alavi | Review: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues[END_REF]. It is an outgrowth of the resource-based theory (RBT) of the firm which was initially proposed by Penrose [START_REF] Penrose | The Theory of the Growth of the Firm[END_REF]. The KBV postulates that organizations render their services offered by using their knowledge. This knowledge is embedded in and carried through multiple entities including organizational culture and identity, routines, policies, systems, documents, and individual employees [START_REF] Grant | Toward a knowledge-based theory of the firm[END_REF]. The KBV is also able to analyze the efficiency characteristics of inter-organizational cooperation, including outsourcing [START_REF] Grant | Reflections on knowledge-based approaches to the organization of production[END_REF]. The precondition for using the KBV in analyzing outsourcing relationships is that the major motivation for outsourcing is to gain access to knowledge which can be used to innovate.

While accessing knowledge can be considered as the learning activities of the organizations in an IT outsourcing relationship, knowledge utilization are the organizational activities to transform knowledge assets into goods or services [START_REF] Grant | A Knowledge Accessing Theory of Strategic Alliances[END_REF]. Knowledge utilization in the service process is the mechanism built within the IT outsourcing relationship that enables IT outsourcing suppliers and clients to share and offer the required expertise which can be used to internalize and facilitate internal innovation.

The KBV suggests that innovating IT outsourcing relationships need specific mechanisms to support efficient knowledge accessing and utilization. The evidence reported by existing literature and the theoretical body of knowledge on Lean indicates that Lean is able to underpin the aforementioned two important components and results in different kinds of innovation outcomes. Figure 1 shows a framework conceptualizing Lean IT service innovation from the perspective of the service organization. The framework describes how IT service innovations can be achieved in cooperation with IT outsourcing suppliers. In this framework, knowledge accessing and utilization are underpinned by four Lean principles (numbered in the figure). Principles are often used to guide decision-making [START_REF] Gong | An Interoperable Architecture and Principles for Implementing Strategy and Policy in Operational Processes[END_REF]. Lean principles are widely used to guide the implementation of Lean thinking [START_REF] Womack | Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated[END_REF][START_REF] Shingo | The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence: Model & Application Guidelines[END_REF]. The four Lean principles presented in Figure 1 are selected as they concern specific areas where IT outsourcing relationships should pay attention to in order to avoid waste and focus on creating value in the knowledge accessing and utilization. In the framework, knowledge accessing is facilitated by the Lean principle "respect everyone" and "continuous improvement". Respect everyone is about involving all people with different backgrounds, insights, skills and experiences that make a distinct contribution to reach the specified goals of an IT service innovation. Involvement drives people to learn and to improve, unlocks creative potential, ultimately enhancing innovativeness. People are the driving force behind IT outsourcing relationships and have to be respected and nurtured to give them a sense of belonging. People should be provided with plenty of opportunities to hone their skills that are at the heart of both an organization's competitiveness and the success of any IT out-sourcing relationship. Similarly, continuous improvement concerns the continuous effort of people to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive problem solving, and having the aim of relentlessly improving the execution and efficiency of processes in an ongoing manner. By focusing on continuous improvement, waste is gradually eliminated causing everyone in the IT outsourcing relationship to focus more on better customer services and innovation.

Knowledge utilization is facilitated by the Lean principles "creating value for the customer" and "systematic thinking". Creating value for the customer concerns everyone knowing what the customer desires and demands. This means people begin with the final result in mind and focus on doing the right things in order to reach this desired result. By clearly hearing the voice of the customer without noise, unclarities or ambiguities, the supplier knows what the customer considers to add value and what is considered waste, thereby allowing the IT outsourcing relationship to innovate. Systematic thinking focuses on viewing the interconnected processes that make up the entire value stream, while being aware of the cause-and-effect interdependencies that either add value or create waste. All parties involved in an IT outsourcing relationship should have a holistic view of the relationship in order to fully comprehend how specific activities for innovation within an IT outsourcing relationship relate to the greater whole, rather than existing in isolation.

Case Study

The case study focuses on a service organization having two relationships with IToutsourcing vendors. One of them provides a business process system and the other provides web-channel related outsourcing services. Both systems are key to the competitive advantage. All the three companies have experience of applying Lean within their own organizations. Hence they possess knowledge and practical experience of Lean which can potentially be applied in their IT outsourcing relationships. For each outsourcing relationship, we conducted six semi-structured interviews at different organizational levels, ranging from top-level executives to operational employees. For each organizational level, interviews were conducted on site at the service organization and supplier organization. All the interviews were conducted face-to-face to allow for a greater degree of interaction. A typical interview lasted approximately two hours in which one or two interviewees participated. Once all the interviews were conducted the findings were documented a case study report. The report was then provided to the interviewees and asked whether it contained any mistakes. The framework we introduced in the last section is used for describing the case. The rest of this section briefly presents the research finding of this case study.

Strategic Direction for IT Service Innovation

Company A is an insurance group of operating companies with different labels and brands in several European countries. Company A covers a broad range of insurance services and products, distributed to the market through a broad mixture of distribu-tion channels. The company is a front-runner in experimenting and exploiting digital customer services and distribution channels. In the view of Company A, IT service innovation can be accomplished by adopting new technologies, by enabling new customer-oriented services, utilizing a mix of service distribution channels and by improving the performance of business processes. Company A selected two IT outsourcing suppliers which have a long history of cooperation with Company A to acquire required technical expertise. Table 1 provides an overview of these IT outsourcing relationships. For a long time, Company A had separate IT departments in each operating company. The IT productivity was considered to be too low and the IT departments spent a significant amount of capital to build customized solutions. The strategy of Company A was to centralize IT organization to integrate operations in order to simplify its IT landscape and use module-based and standard solutions to allow quick creation of new business processes and the deployment of new services. In the centralized IT environment, Company A decided to use the standard solution from Supplier B for core insurance and banking systems, next to the reusable, modular frontend components from Supplier C.

Business Process System Innovation

In the co-development project between Company A and Supplier B, both companies were aiming to develop a standard solution for the insurance industry. Such a partnership itself is already viewed as an innovative cooperation by some interviewees. Company A is the first insurance company adopting the insurance solution of Supplier B together with other ERP components from Supplier B across the entire company. In this sense, Company A plays an important role for Supplier B to improve its insurance solution. Looking from the other side, Supplier B can offer Company A not just the latest IT technology, but also knowledge and experience acquired from IT projects implemented at other market players in the insurance industry. In their collaboration, Company A is involved as of requirements engineering up until final validation of the solution that was built by Supplier B.

Knowledge accessing

Both companies attach a great deal of weight to the professional development of their employees. Supplier B has plenty of internal training resources to allow its people to learn, including the development of soft skills referring to collaboration and cultural aspects. Building together with Supplier B, Company A also has an internal training program on the products of Supplier B. In addition, consultants from Supplier B are co-located at Company A to facilitate the deployment of the solution and bring back the feedback from Company A to the development center of Supplier B. There is a lot of discussion between the two companies on identifying the opportunities of improvement and innovation. The use of Lean techniques such as Kaizen and A3 thinking for problem solving on an outsourcing relationship level was being discussed. Both companies know that people need to adopt innovation and have to incorporate these in their daily behaviors to ensure continuous improvement. Management at a tactical level carefully balances the efforts on routine work/delivery and innovation. They promote proactive innovation in a modest but sustainable way so that it has fewer interruptions on the current processes and consequently less resistance.

Knowledge utilization

The chief architect and people at the strategic level of Company A decide whether a business process is designed well enough and which processes are important enough to be placed on the roadmap for the system development. By sharing this roadmap with Supplier B, Company A shares a clear vision on the transformation. In the software development, Company A is closely involved with Supplier B in the development of the insurance solution. Occasionally, Company A's experts and architects are invited to the development center of Supplier B for joint solution design sessions.

People at the tactical level of Company A hold a plan-build-run meeting every two weeks with people from Supplier B. The meeting provides updates on all the issues that they previously decided to monitor. Issues they focus on are related to safeguarding the service delivery or creating innovative ideas. On an operational level, there is a collaborative contract to support operational people of Company A with quick problem-solving and addressing any findings for improvement and innovation.

However, despite that people have learned value stream mapping during trainings, we found that neither of the companies uses this technique in their outsourcing relationship. Some interviewees indicated to believe that both company have optimized procedures, but neither organization wants to change its internal processes for an optimized cross-organizational value stream. This implies that a higher level of openness and a clear business model for value sharing are required to achieve common systematic thinking in IT outsourcing relationships to enable cross-organizational optimization.

Service Delivery Channels Innovation

In the outsourcing relationship for the development of website components, Supplier C provided software development outsourcing services to Company A through on-shore and offshore teams. A parallel 'software development factory' structure was introduced to provide Company A with flexible and sufficient software development capacity. Two factories similar in size are working in parallel: one factory belongs to Supplier C, whereas the other factory belongs to Company A. In addition, a small team of software architects from Supplier C are working on-site at Company A. The two parallel factories are treated in an equal manner, meaning that for any random order, a set of requirements of to-be developed software components will be sent to either one of these factories. A deliverable, being one or more software components developed by either the factory of Company A or the factory of Supplier C, will be sent to a unified quality gate of Company A to be tested.

Knowledge accessing

The strategic direction is to create a competitive but open and healthy learning environment between the two parallel factories. This learning environment stimulates the people involved to improve their software development skills and to learn from their peers working for the other factory.

The business strategy of Company A demands each operating company to have its own website as a service delivery channel to its customers. The best way to achieve this is to develop reusable components and build websites based on those components rather than to develop each website individually. As a consequence, Company A decided that the reusable components have to be built on the Microsoft .NET framework. A major challenge for Company A was that its software development personnel had to switch to this new development environment, and that people had to learn new technical skills. Within this outsourcing relationship, having a peer factory with strong software development skills at Supplier C results in competition between the factory of Company A and the factory of Supplier C. This results in a competitive culture in which both factories strive to outperform each other. As a consequence, people working in both development factories attempt to earn the respect and recognition of their peers for their craftsmanship, accompanied by a strong willingness to learn and to improve.

Both organizations recognize the benefit of such a competitive environment. Every quarter both factories visit each other to facilitate learning. Each visit typically lasts several days, depending on the subjects and purposes, and provides sufficient time for communication and discussion. Subjects discussed include software engineering and project management. Having sufficient time during a visit allows people to work together on a certain issue in an in-depth manner. Examples of discussions are how the process of developing a software component can be broken down into an action plan in a team meeting, how the most difficult part of the component can be identified, and how to decide upon the most optimal priority of different tasks to be carried out during development. Both organizations also provide or support various software-related technical trainings to employees. Occasionally, Supplier C invites people from Company A to attend its internal trainings on new and related technologies. Those trainings allow both factories to keep up with the latest technologies that are related to their current or future work.

In this case study, we found that board level meetings often involve operational people. During such meetings, people discuss issues of continuous improvement and conduct Kaizen sessions. These Kaizen sessions involve managers from both factories and also the software architects from Supplier C working on-site at Company A. Issues about continuous improvement are also discussed on a lower level. Those issues include, but are not limited to, how capacity forecasting can be improved, how people's skills can be improved, or if their roles and positions should be adjusted.

Both factories also have their own daily start-up meeting. During the bilateral visits, personnel join in the local daily start-up meetings and exchange ideas and experiences. The parallel factories setting allows people to compare different ways of working in designing and analyzing a software component and the way of prioritizing the work in progress. This comparison results in fresh ideas for continuous improvement and experiments and subsequently results in process innovations.

Knowledge utilization

The knowledge utilization in this IT outsourcing relationship begins with functional requirements engineering. Functional requirements of websites originally come from the operating companies of Company A. The IT department at Company A translates those functional requirements into IT requirements and component-based system design solutions. During this process, software architects from Supplier C are often involved, sometimes leading the design. To evaluate those novel solutions, Microsoft is involved during the review process to ensure the technical feasibility of the solution. Eventually, these design solutions become orders for software components and are sent to one of the two factories.

During the software component development stage, we found that both factories make use of internal value stream mapping. Activities were undertaken to create process maps, but did not cross the border of the factory. In other words, these activities were not performed from an end-to-end perspective, but limited to internal software development processes. Nevertheless, analyzing segments of multiple value streams helped both factories to improve their way of working. The type of innovations achieved mainly improve the efficiency of software development. Those improvements originate from the best practices of the two parallel factories. As the two factories remain independent in their daily operations, knowledge utilization rarely happened in this stage.

Discussion and Conclusions

The case study presented in this paper shows that the application of Lean principles facilitate knowledge accessing and utilization in both IT outsourcing relationships to a large extent. Not all the four principles were completely followed in the studied two outsourcing relationships. Systematic knowledge sharing is often found to be difficult to be achieved in IT outsourcing relationships, as the exchange is blocked by the boundary of organizations. This reduces the opportunities of innovations. Higher levels of openness are a requirement for both organizations to facilitate innovation. In addition, the case study shows that service innovations can have various forms. The co-development relationship between Company A and Supplier B can be considered as an innovation in itself where both companies established a strategic alignment to create a new ERP solution. The next step in the innovation process will be to develop this as a standard for the insurance industry. In the outsourcing relationship between Company A and Supplier C, we observed several process innovations resulting in the improvement of software development processes. IT service innovation is an ongoing process that provide the end-customer with a new service experience or solution. To achieve this, the service organization should establish a clear strategic direction for IT service innovation. Based on this strategic direction and Lean thinking, the service organization can better involve its IT outsourcing suppliers in the efforts for knowledge accessing and utilization. Different learning environment (e.g. co-development or competition) can be established to facilitate the knowledge accessing and utilization for different domains. Lean principles are widely applicable in different contexts to amplify the effect of the learning environment and the efficiency of knowledge utilization.

Traditionally Lean driven innovation focuses on manufacturing and production environment rather than service industries. IT service innovation often co-evolves with IT outsourcing activities and as such innovation is a result of knowledge accessing and utilization between the service organization and its outsourcing suppliers. With a Lean management system, IT service innovation should be viewed as an ongoing process in which innovations at different domains including business process system and service delivery channels are involved. The key principles of Lean driven IT service innovation are 1) respect everyone 2) continuous improvement 3) create value for the customer and 4) systematic thinking. The explorative case study shows that the application of these Lean principles facilitate knowledge accessing and utilization. Applying these principles facilitate the learning behaviors of the people working in the IT outsourcing relationships. Based on a clear strategic direction of IT service innovation and applying Lean principles allowed smooth communication on innovative ideas and drive innovations at different domains of the IT service process. Future research should focus on examining the applicability of those Lean principles to facilitate IT service innovation in different domains besides the insurance industry.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. A conceptual framework of Lean IT service innovation

Table 1 .

 1 An overview of the IT outsourcing relationships studied

	IT-	Outsourcing	IT outsourcing content and motivation
	Outsourcing	domain
	Supplier
	B	Business process systems	Co-development of an insurance ERP system which can support multiple digital channels for customer interaction
			Development of reusable website components for
	C	Service delivery channels	every operating company of Company A to allow them building up their own website quickly by
			configuring components

Acknowledgement

The preliminary work of this research is supported by the Lean Education and Research Network (LEArN) at Nyenrode Business University.


Yong Liu
email: yong.liu@wiso.uni-hamburg.de

Shengli Deng

Feng Hu
email: hufeng@zjnu.cn

E-Loyalty Building in Competitive E-Service Market of SNS: Resources, Habit, Satisfaction and Switching Costs

Keywords: social networking, service loyalty, habit, critical mass, switching cost, satisfaction, supplemental entertainment, SNS

Despite considerable efforts have been devoted to study consumer loyalty, there is a lack of knowledge concerning how online service loyalty is or can be established in a competitive e-service market, in which several major service providers coexist to compete for customers. In this study, we attempt to explore the industry environment of Chinese social networking service (SNS), and examine the association between consumer satisfaction and switching costs in building service loyalty. From a resource-based view, unique service resources of SNS (critical mass and supplemental entertainment) are examined regarding their potentials in enhancing consumer satisfaction, habit and switching costs. The results show that habit and the interaction effect of satisfaction and switching cost are the key determinants of SNS loyalty. Critical mass and supplemental entertainment directly or indirectly affect habit and switching costs. This study attempts to bring the thought of competitive environment into e-service loyalty research while new insights for e-service loyalty building in different market environments are discussed.

Introduction

"Even though the results of customer-satisfaction surveys are an important indicator of the health of the business, relying solely on them can be fatal [17, p. 4]."

Today's enterprises are continually looking for ways to enhance customer loyalty mainly through improving consumer satisfaction. Loyal customers are vital to the long-run profitability of any business as acquiring a new customer may cost as much as five times more than retaining an extant customer [START_REF] Madhavan Parthasarathy | Understanding post-adoption behavior in the context of online services[END_REF]. Consequently, it is not astonishing that building customer loyalty has been acknowledged as an integral part of doing business or the 'business back-bone' [START_REF] Gremler | Service loyalty: its nature, importance, and implications[END_REF]. In currently increasingly servicebased economies [START_REF] Dai | Antecedents of online service quality, commitment and loyalty[END_REF], a growing interest has been dedicated to consumer loyalty building in an e-service or Internet environment.

A considerable number of studies on e-service loyalty (e-loyalty) have been conducted in recent years, most of which suggest that consumer loyalty, as a result of consumer satisfaction, is mainly gained through improving service quality. However, previous works have claimed that the effect of satisfaction on consumer loyalty varies greatly under the condition of different levels of switching costs in, i.e. various human-mediated physical service environments [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF]. There is lack of relevant knowledge and researches in the contexts of e-service community. For instance, little knowledge is available concerning how e-loyalty is altered along with the evolution of business environment, in particular when the market becomes highly competitive with several competent service providers.

In addition, website design tools are under rapid development with the advances in information and communication technology (ICT), which has made it an easy task to develop or even 'duplicate' new website functionality or applications. As a result, it becomes more difficulty today for e-service providers to gain advantages in competition simply relying on a well-working service website, in particular when competitors start to 'learn' fast from each other. In an Internet environment, where competition may be only one click away [START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF], a rising concern is how to make their service distinguishing, i.e. through offering unique resources.

From a resource-based view, the study sought to investigate the interdependencies between unique e-service resource, habit, consumer satisfaction and switching costs in building consumer loyalty in a highly competitive service market-the social networking service (SNS) market in China. In this market, several competent SNS suppliers coexist to compete for consumers while offering similar web functionalities and presentation. Two unique resources underlying SNS-critical mass and supplemental entertainment, are discussed and examined regarding their roles in facilitating consumer habit, satisfaction and switching costs.

Theoretical Background

Determinants of e-loyalty: Service quality and satisfaction

Customer loyalty has long been a hot research topic for both business and marketing. The last several decades have witnessed a paradigm shift from tangible products (i.e. brand loyalty) to human-mediated service (i.e. hotel and restaurant) and to recent computer-mediated service (or e-service) in this field, along with the advance of information technologies. According to various researches on customer loyalty, the framework of service quality-satisfaction-consumer loyalty or its extension has been widely employed in tangible products and human-mediated service contexts [START_REF] Bloemer | Linking perceived service quality and service loyalty: a multidimensional perspective[END_REF][START_REF] Gremler | Service loyalty: its nature, importance, and implications[END_REF]. Apparently, e-service loyalty has been mainly assumed to be a result of satisfaction, which is enhanced by a diversity of service quality.

Despite the widespread emphasis of satisfaction on e-loyalty establishment, recent research on switching behavior of e-service seems to offer a different picture. "New IT choices are only a click away on the Internet, and switching to a competing IT is almost as easy as downloading and installing it, or completing an online registration form to sign up for a different service" [START_REF] Bhattacherjee | User switching of information technology: A theoretical synthesis and empirical test[END_REF]. As a result, it becomes increasingly easier for online consumers to switch to other service providers who offer similar services [START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF]. In certain e-service market (i.e. online gaming industry), it seems to be especially difficult to build customer loyalty, while satisfied consumers may easily switch to other service providers [c.f. 25]. A recent study on massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) found that high attractiveness of alternatives and low switching cost significantly motivate game players' switching intention [START_REF] Hou | Migrating to a new virtual world": Exploring MMORPG switching through human migration theory[END_REF]. [START_REF] Steenkamp | The role of optimum stimulation level in exploratory consumer behavior[END_REF] noted that switching behaviors may occur among satisfied customers due to their attempt to try something novel or different for fun or thrill [START_REF] Steenkamp | The role of optimum stimulation level in exploratory consumer behavior[END_REF]. Customers may be satisfied with their choices, but may still switch to alternatives owing to a desire for novelty or complexity in brand consumption or curiosity, or getting bored, fed up, on repetitively doing the same thing [START_REF] Fiske | Functions of varied experience[END_REF][START_REF] Herrnstein | A theory of addiction[END_REF][START_REF] Raju | Optimum Stimulation Level: Its Relationship to Personality, Demographics, and Exploratory Behavior[END_REF]. [START_REF] Balabanis | Bases of e-store loyalty: Perceived switching barriers and satisfaction[END_REF] found that satisfaction is a significant predictor of e-loyalty only for those consumers who have a low level of satisfaction [START_REF] Balabanis | Bases of e-store loyalty: Perceived switching barriers and satisfaction[END_REF]. [START_REF] Bhattacherjee | User switching of information technology: A theoretical synthesis and empirical test[END_REF] reported that satisfaction with prior e-service provider only has a small and marginal negative influence on switching behavior [START_REF] Bhattacherjee | User switching of information technology: A theoretical synthesis and empirical test[END_REF].

Business environment and consumer categories

The inconsistence in previous research findings between e-service loyalty and switching behavior may be interpreted from the perspective of business environment. By an investigation of a diversity of tangible products and physical services, a study of [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF] noted that a consumer's perceived satisfaction affects loyalty in a different way in different industry settings [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF], as shown in Figure 1. An consumer may be loyal to a specific service with a low degree of satisfaction, but also betray a service provider in spite of a high degree of satisfaction [c.f. 17]. As a result, based on the interaction patterns between satisfaction and loyalty, Jones & Sasser (1995, p. 11) suggested that "consumers behave in one of four basic ways: as loyalists, as defectors, as mercenaries, or as hostages", as shown in Table 1.

Figure 1. How the competitive environment affects the satisfaction-loyalty

relationship (Source: adapted from [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF][START_REF] Lee | The impact of switching costs on the customer satisfaction-loyalty link : mobile phone service in France[END_REF]) In a highly competitive and low differentiation market, consumers are more likely to be low loyal whilst having a high level of satisfaction, therefore being mercenary. Based on the work of [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF], more mercenary consumers will appear in e-service markets as a result of increased competition and decreased differentiation [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF]. For instance, Hsiao & Yang (2011) noted that a critical issue in online retailing research is how to identify, attract, and retain customers since online shoppers are typically regarded as less loyal [START_REF] Hsiao | The intellectual development of the technology acceptance model: A co-citation analysis[END_REF].

A resource-based view of e-loyal building

From a resource-based view, a firm's performance is founded on a collection of physical and intangible resources (assets or capabilities) that enable it to compete with other firms [START_REF] Vinekar | Towards a Unified Model of Information Technology Business Value[END_REF]. Different industry may feature different sorts of resources. For instance, Barney (1991, p. 101) defined resources as "all assets, capabilities, organizational processes, firm attributes, information, knowledge, etc. controlled by a firm that enable the firm to conceive of and implement strategies that improve is efficiency and effectiveness" [START_REF] Barney | Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage[END_REF]. A good firm resource should be valuable, heterogeneous, immobile, and non-substitutable, and therefore lead to sustainable competitive advantage of the firm [START_REF] Mata | Information technology and sustained competitive advantage: a resource-based analysis[END_REF]. Previous works suggest that unique service resources may contribute to important dimensions of service quality, which further enhances consumer satisfaction and therefore loyalty. These resources may be external in nature, such as good location and transportation convenience of a hotel [START_REF] Knutson | Frequent travelers: making them happy and bringing them back[END_REF][START_REF] Tsaur | Determinants of guest loyalty to international tourist hotels-a neural network approach[END_REF], or internal, such as personal friendship to customer, routes availability in online flight booking service [c.f. 7]. Since the method of a resource-based view has been widely applied to investigate physical brand and tangible service, this method should be applicable to e-service contexts. In other words, e-service providers should seek to explore and develop unique service resources in order to make their services distinguishing and to achieve competitive advantages. It is noted that, pertaining to different natures of e-service categories, previous studies have identified a number of unique service characteristics that affect service acceptance [START_REF] Kim | The role of etail quality, e-satisfaction and e-trust in online loyalty development process[END_REF][START_REF] Srinivasan | Customer loyalty in e-commerce: an exploration of its antecedents and consequences[END_REF], many of which can be regarded as a sort of e-service resources.

Highly competitive e-service market: new challenges to loyalty research

Of various Internet services in China, Tencent QQ (QQ), a free instant messaging computer program, is obviously one of the most successful applications. In September 2011, the active QQ user accounts for QQ IM amounted to 711.7 million while its peak concurrent users reached 145.4 million (Tencent, 2011). Note the fact that there were 513 million Internet users in China in 2011 [START_REF]CNNIC: The 29th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China[END_REF] 1 . Whilst QQ is initially developed for instant communication, the company seeks to integrate a diversity of value-added services to the QQ and develops it to be a customized "one stop for all" application. An increasing amount of Internet services have been integrated to the simple interface of QQ (like MSN). As a result, through simply clicking on icons in its interface, QQ users can access a diversity of various Internet services, such as email, online music, games, web TV, online shopping, Internet disk, SNS and many others. One stop for all application strategy offers QQ unique advantages compared to other service providers, as there is no more need for users to make additional registration and to remember additional account and password information towards a new service supplier. In addition, friends list of instant messaging service can be easily migrated to SNS, which saves QQ users' lots of efforts to establish a new network for SNS. Also as an integrated function, new updates from SNS (i.e. comments, new posts) will be presented to users through the simple interface of QQ.

Considering various inherent advantages of SNS at QQ, it seems that it should be easy to convert loyal QQ instant messaging users to be loyal SNS users alike. However, as one of the earliest SNS providers, market share of QQ's SNS (or Qzone) has been eaten away by more recent entrants to the industry. Many users shift to other SNS providers despite their loyalty to QQ IM and give up various benefits offered. They are willing to use other SNS services, even if they have to spend additional efforts to open the browser, to fill in account and password information and to search people for reconstructing their new network. Currently, there are 190 million active SNS users for Qzone, 96 million for Renren.com and 40.1 million for Kaixin001.com [START_REF]TechRice: Recruiting via China's Social Networks[END_REF]. The SNS market in China is dominated by several suppliers that provide similar services. After several years of development and competition, SNS suppliers share considerable similarities in their website presentation and functionalities despite limited differences. In this regard, it would be interesting to scrutinize what are unique service features (or resources) to distinguish a SNS supplier from a user's perspective.

Research framework and hypotheses development

To evaluate SNS service loyalty, a research framework is proposed. Five hypothesized determinants of loyalty are included, which are habit, satisfaction, switching costs, supplementary entertainments and critical mass.

Satisfaction can be defined as a personal's feeling of pleasure or disappointment resulting from comparing a service's perceived performance (or outcome) in relation to his or her expectations [START_REF] Kotler | Marketing management[END_REF]. Previous literature provides unambiguous supports for the positive influence of satisfaction on customer loyalty. Consistent with previous studies, it is expected that the same influence works in SNS alike. Hence, we hypothesized:

H1: Satisfaction positively relates to consumer loyalty.

In service loyalty research, switching costs measure a consumer's perceived difficulty in switching to a new service supplier, which represents anything that makes it more difficult or costly for consumer to change providers [START_REF] Chang | Relational benefits, switching barriers and loyalty: A study of airline customers in Taiwan[END_REF]. Switching costs are not only economic in nature, but also can be emotional or psychological, such as interpersonal relationships and special treatment [START_REF] Chang | Relational benefits, switching barriers and loyalty: A study of airline customers in Taiwan[END_REF][START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF]. Many studies suggest switching costs exert a direct influence on service loyalty, arguing that if consumers encounter a high switching costs, they are more likely to stay with the service supplier [START_REF] Amin | Factors Contributing to Customer Loyalty Towards Telecommunication Service Provider[END_REF][START_REF] Chang | Relational benefits, switching barriers and loyalty: A study of airline customers in Taiwan[END_REF][START_REF] Wang | The relationship of service failure severity, service recovery justice and perceived switching costs with customer loyalty in the context of e-tailing[END_REF][START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF]. Therefore, we hypothesized: H2: Switching costs positively relate to consumer loyalty. [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF] pointed out that the degree of switching costs differ a lot in different service sectors, which may alter the effects of satisfaction on service loyalty [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF]. [START_REF] Balabanis | Bases of e-store loyalty: Perceived switching barriers and satisfaction[END_REF] classified satisfaction to be high, moderate and low levels, and hypothesized that influence of perceived switching barriers on e-store loyalty is greater when satisfaction is low [START_REF] Balabanis | Bases of e-store loyalty: Perceived switching barriers and satisfaction[END_REF]. [START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF]) divided eservice users to be two subgroups of unsatisfied and satisfied users, and reported a significant interaction effects of switching costs and satisfaction on customer loyalty in satisfied user group [START_REF] Yang | Customer perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs[END_REF]. [START_REF] Lee | The impact of switching costs on the customer satisfaction-loyalty link : mobile phone service in France[END_REF] studied mobile phone service loyalty and reported a positive interaction effect of switching costs and satisfaction on loyalty [START_REF] Lee | The impact of switching costs on the customer satisfaction-loyalty link : mobile phone service in France[END_REF]. [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF] suggested that, in a high competitive and low differentiation market, people become mercenary and have a low commitment. Therefore, it is important to build switching costs to retain customers [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF]. Therefore, we hypothesized: H3: Interaction effects between satisfaction and switching costs positively relate to consumer loyalty.

Habit can be defined as the "learned sequences of acts that become automatic responses to specific situations, which may be functional in obtaining certain goals or end states" [START_REF] Verplanken | Habit, information acquisition, and the process of making travel mode choices[END_REF]. The concept and function of habit has been broadly investigated across a diversity of disciplines, like social psychology, health sciences, marketing/consumer behavior, IT user behavior and organizational behavior [START_REF] Chou | Understanding Mobile Apps Continuance Usage Behavior and Habit: An Expectance-Confirmation Theory[END_REF]. Frequently performed behaviors tend to become habitual and hence automatic over time [START_REF] Ouellette | Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior[END_REF]. Habitual behavior is difficult to resist and substantial conscious efforts are needed for individuals in order to alter their habits. Therefore, altering habit in order to switch to another service provide may exert to be a sort of switching cost. Furthermore, consumers may express their loyalty to an e-service provider simply as a result of habit. In other words, they are 'lazy' to make a change or feel difficult to change their habit of being 'loyal' to existent service provider. Accordingly, the following hypothesis is made:

H4a: Habit positively relates to switching cost. H4b: Habit positively relates to loyalty. From a resource-based view, unique resources or capability of a company means the unique service attributes help to discriminate a service provider from others to enhance competitiveness. Unique resources can be internal, accumulated with times and co-created with customers, i.e. hotel stuff's personal relationship or friendship to customers [START_REF] Butcher | Evaluative and relational influences on service loyalty[END_REF]. Concerning SNS, supplementary entertainments can be regarded as a sort of internal resources. Specifically, it refers to the entertainments/games offered by SNS; these entertainments/games are not specifically designed for information sharing or communication purpose, but to offer entertainment that a user can play to compete with peers even when peers are offline. The strategy of providing supplementary entertainments has been dominantly applied by today's SNS providers. Taking 'Happy Farm' social game for instance, it is one of the most popular social networking games in China. At the height of its popularity, there were 23 million daily active users who log in to the game at least every 24 hours 2 . As a value-added element for SNS, a provision of supplementary entertainments potentially brings about more pleasure to SNS user, making consumers more likely to feel satisfied. Therefore, it is proposed: H5a: Supplementary entertainments positively relate to satisfaction. Furthermore, frequently interacting with the supplementary entertainments may contribute to a motivator of forming habitual behavior to access SNS. In other words, supplementary entertainments may contribute to the establishment of habitual use of SNS. Therefore, it is proposed:

H5b: Supplementary entertainments positively relate to habit. External resources refer to the service attributes, which are not generated by the service provider, but contribute to be an important aspect of service, such as the transportation convenience to a hotel customer. Concerning SNS, critical mass is proposed to affect consumer service experience as a kind of external resources. It refers to an important segment of population that chooses to take part in the SNS [START_REF] Allen | New telecommunications services: Network externalities and critical mass[END_REF][START_REF] Oliver | A theory of the critical mass. I. Interdependence, group heterogeneity, and the production of collective action[END_REF]. Critical mass makes major contributions to the collective action as well as to later subscribers [START_REF] Allen | New telecommunications services: Network externalities and critical mass[END_REF][START_REF] Oliver | A theory of the critical mass. I. Interdependence, group heterogeneity, and the production of collective action[END_REF]. A new network by its nature requires a group of subscribers if it is to startup; the network becomes mature to move beyond that point in its development where a critical mass has initially assembled [START_REF] Allen | New telecommunications services: Network externalities and critical mass[END_REF]. As a result, new subscribers to a mature SNS can join one after another instead of as a group [START_REF] Allen | New telecommunications services: Network externalities and critical mass[END_REF]. For instance, a user subscribes to a SNS, for that his/her friends are there already; as a result, s/he subscribes to the SNS by join the already existed circle of his/her friends with no need to establish a new network by his/her own efforts. Hence, users may decide to be loyal to a specific SNS so that they can connect to the people who are important to them, such as friends and relatives. The possibility to communicate with important others inside the network should be an important purpose of using SNS, which enhance their satisfaction to the service. Furthermore, when users have lots of friends using the SNS, it is more likely for them to communicate with their friends via SNS and therefore make the SNS use to be habitual. Therefore, we proposed: H6a: Critical mass positively relates to habit. H6b: Critical mass positively relates to switching costs.

Research methodology

Survey and questionnaires

As there are many SNS operators in China, Qzone, the biggest social networking service provider in China, is selected as the subject for survey. A five-point Likertscale ranging from disagree (1) to agree (5) was used to measure each item of the model. The questionnaire survey was conducted online. We provided a hyperlink to the survey web page and posted it to different forums, while the respondents would be directed to the online version of the questionnaire by clicking on the hyperlink. Finally, 228 complete samples were collected, seven of which have no prior use experience and were therefore omitted from the analysis. The final samples consist of 99 males (44.8%) and 122 females (55.2%). Most respondents are under 25 years old (n = 175) and have used computers for over 3 years (n = 194). 73.3 percent (n = 162) of participants have an experience of using Qzone for over 3 years while 44 respondents (19.9%) has 1-3 years use experience. Only 15 participants (6.8%) have a use experience of less than 1 year.

Reliability and validity of measurement

Partial Least Squares (PLS) path modeling technologies were utilized to analyze the data using SmartPLS 2.0. Convergent validity indicates the degrees to which the items of a scale that are assumed to be theoretically associated are also related in reality. As shown in Table 3 and 4, all values of Cronbach's alpha, factor loadings and CR are over their thresholds of 0.5 and 0.7 respectively. Discriminant validity refers to whether the items of a scale reflect the construct in question or reflect another related construct. It can be verified if the variances of the average variance extracted for each construct are higher than any squared correlation between this construct and any other construct, the discriminant validity is supported [START_REF] Fornell | Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error[END_REF].

Data analysis and model assessment

Discussion and implications

Figure 2 shows that, in this competitive SNS market, consumers tend to be mercenary, whereas a high satisfaction of SNS users doesn't guarantee a high loyalty toward service provider. In addition, satisfaction alone cannot bring about loyalty as well. Consistent with the work of Jones & Sasser (1995), we propose that consumer satisfaction may not be such a reliable indicator of loyalty for e-service market, in particular when the market becomes more competitive with less differentiation. Consumers behave differently in response to different industry environments. In other words, the change of industry environment itself may effectively alter the way that consumers choose to be loyal to a company, i.e. mercenary versus hostage consumers.

The results show a strong interaction effect between satisfaction and switching costs on SNS loyalty. In other words, it is really difficult to establish user loyalty in SNS: only when consumers are satisfied with service provider and are feeling difficulty to switch, they become loyal. This also suggests that satisfaction is a necessary condition of service loyalty. Satisfied consumers can be either loyal or not loyal to service provider based on the level of switching cost, but dissatisfied consumers definitely exert no loyalty. Habit has in particular strong and direct influence on SNS loyalty. This implies that, in Chinese SNS market, consumer loyalty is more like a sort of habitual behavior. In other words, there is a high risk of consumer switch, if they are strongly motivated to change their habit, e.g. by their peers (critical mass). Furthermore, critical mass and supplementary entertainments are found to be important resources that significantly enhance consumer habit, satisfaction and switching costs on SNS. This indicates that, if a SNS maintained an individual's network by hosting the people who are important to him/her, the user is less likely to switch because it will cause a loss of connections to those important people. Also the time and efforts spent on supplementary entertainment, such as social networking games, appears to be valuable to the consumers. They feel more satisfied if they engage in supplementary entertainment, in particular when they play together with their friends.

Conclusion

In this study, we sought to introduce a resource-based view into the field of e-service research, and to interpret how unique service resources help establish both satisfaction and switching costs. Whilst the resource-based view has been dominantly utilized to study the competitiveness of different companies and organization, this approach is novel to the field of e-service research. Based on the research findings of this study, we argued that it is important to recruit and develop unique service capabilities in order to make the e-service distinguishing and to achieve competitiveness. While previous works have examined the influence of industry settings in affecting satisfaction-loyalty relationship mainly concerning human-mediated service industries [START_REF] Jones | Why satisfied customers defect[END_REF], our study investigates the loyalty building in a competitive e-service market with several competent suppliers. The results of this study illustrate that, in Chinese SNS market, despite of a high satisfaction, consumer loyalty cannot be established without a proper level of switching costs. In Internet environment, the choice of websites is already huge and increasing. Therefore, it is essential for websites to focus more on increasing switching costs than eliminating alternatives. In this regard, our results facilitates a more complete understanding on e-service loyalty building in context and seeks to raise the research interests in unique service resources for developing distinguishing e-service. Previous studies show that switching costs vary in different industry settings while the effects of satisfaction on customer retention will be deteriorated in case of high switching costs [START_REF] Lee | The impact of switching costs on the customer satisfaction-loyalty link : mobile phone service in France[END_REF]. Simply considering e-service loyalty from the view of satisfaction, important information might be underexplored, in particular if industry environment and switching costs become a matter of importance. There is a dearth of relevant wisdom in the e-service field concerning some new and emerging business phenomena, such as the predicament faced by Qzone.

Figure 2

 2 Figure2depicts the results of model testing. As shown in the Figure, both satisfaction and switching cost alone have no significant effect on loyalty. Instead, the interaction effect of satisfaction and switching cost has significant influence on loyalty. Furthermore, habit exerts a substantial and strong influence on both loyalty and switching cost. Critical mass exerts a significant influence on habit, but not on switching cost. Supplementary entertainments significantly affect both habit and satisfaction. Critical mass and supplemental materials have indirect influences on

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Results

  Dash line: Insignificant influence ***: p < 0.001

Table 1 . Individual customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior

 1

		(adapted from: Jones & Sasser, 1995)
		Satisfaction	Loyalty	Behavior
	Loyalist	High	High	Staying and supportive
	Defector	Low to medium Low to medium Leaving or having left and unhayppy
	Mercenary	High	Low to medium Coming and going; low commitment
	Hostage	Low to medium	High	unable to switch; trapped

Table 2 . Reliability and convergent validity statistics

 2

	Construct	α	CR	Minim. factor loading
	Satisfaction	0.941	0.957	0.907
	Switching costs	0.871	0.912	0.817
	Supplementary entertainments	0.820	0.917	0.917
	Critical mass	0.883	0.944	0.944
	Habit	0.969	0.980	0.961
	Loyalty	0.923	0.951	0.904

Table 3 . Discriminant validity

 3

	(The bold diagonals are the AVEs of the individual constructs; off diagonal values are
	the squared correlations between constructs)
	Construct	Mean	Sa	Sc	Se	Cm	Ha	Lo
	Satisfaction (Sa)	3.26	0.850
	Switching costs (Sc)	2.60	0.149	0.722
	Supplementary entertainments (Se)	3.19	0.247	0.199	0.847
	Critical mass (Cm)	3.45	0.168	0.127	0.098	0.895
	Habit (Ha)	2.96	0.565	0.596	0.383	0.561	0.942
	Loyalty (Lo)	2.45	0.304	0.544	0.165	0.202	0.750 0.868

Some Internet user may actively use two or more QQ accounts.

See. http://game.dayoo.com/200911/20/68602_100420554.htm

Acknowledgements

This research is partly supported by Wuhan University Academic Development Plan for Scholars after 1970s for the project Research on Internet User Behavior and the National Funds of Social Science (No. 14BTQ044), the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science in China (No. 13CTQ029) and the Zhejiang Province Planning Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences (No. 11JCGL04YB).