Navigating Transformative Service Research for individual and social well-being: A comprehensive review

This systematic literature review (SLR) explores Transformative Service Research (TSR) in the Business, Management, and Accounting domains. The primary objective is to discern pivotal factors associated with the conception, design, and execution of transformative services (TSs) to improve individual and social well-being. This research endeavour holds the promise of contributing substantially to enhancing service design principles and practices promoting well-being at different levels and in different domains. Based on a search query string with rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, the SLR identified a sample of 188 studies indexed in both Web of Science and Scopus databases. Through descriptive, bibliometric and (manual) content analyses, we depicted the current intellectual structure of the transformative service knowledge domain and the pivotal factor of TSR mainly resulting from healthcare service provision. The manual content analysis confirmed that the current literature has addressed significant components and well-being outcomes identified in the TS founding framework, mainly across health services and financial services in urban environments. Tourism and hospitality are emerging and promising TSR fields, and heritage, culture, and creativity are poorly investigated. Preliminary results indicate that TSR is yet to be fully developed in specific domains and ecosystems, and more research is warranted to shed light on the dynamic realm of transformative services and their contribution outside the traditional domain where TSR developed.