以語意觀點為基礎之文化建模於服務創新

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國立政治大學資訊管理學系

碩士學位論文

指導教授：苑守慈博士

A Semantic Perspective of Culture Modeling Toward

Service Innovation

研究生：戴華呈

中華民國 101 年 7 月

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II

摘要

服務創新和發展文化創意產業已成為在這幾年的熱門話題。許多的研究也顯示出文化背景對影響人們做決策和經營管理的重要性；並且，許多相關的文獻也顯示，融合文化來做服務創新的可能性。因此，在這項研究中，我們的目標研究就是要了解是否有任何可以讓我們結合當地的文化資產還有運用資訊科技的協助來促進中小企業達到服務創新的可能性。我們期望可以用文化的角度來看資訊科技於服務創新上的應用，尤其是對中小型企業的業主。在本文中，我們提出了「文化驅動因子」，藉以傳達人受到文化的影響所傳達出來的情感、價值觀和行為等。除此之外，我們更進一步的提出以語意為基礎的資訊系統，希望藉由本系統，我們可以用一種新穎的方式來詮釋當地的文化，並使用當地文化影響下所生成的「文化驅動因子」來激勵中小企業做服務創新。我們相信我們的系統可以激發中小企業，了解他們的文化背景，並進一步實現服務創新的目標。關鍵詞：中小企業，在地文化，文化背景，文化驅動因子，語意資訊系統，服務創新

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III

ABSTRACT

To do service innovation and to develop culture and creative industry are becoming a hot issue in these years. A lot of researches have been demonstrating the importance of culture and how it relates or influences to people's decision making and business management. However, few researches to date show the IT enabled use of culture ingredients to do service innovation. Accordingly, in this research we aim to investigate if there is any possibility for us to utilize cultural factors and IT to facilitate the creation service innovation opportunities. Therefore, we intend to view service innovation from the lens of local cultural factors and IT, especially for the small and medium business owners (SMBs). In this paper, we proposed “cultural interpretations” as the emotions, values and behavior, etc. which people convey out through the effect of culture. In addition, we come up with a semantic information system to motive or inspire SMBs with a new way to think about service innovation by leveraging the local culture in terms of the perspective of “cultural interpretations”. We believe our system could motive SMBs to understand their culture context and then achieve the goal of doing service innovation.

Keywords: SMBs, Local Culture, Culture Context, Cultural Interpretation, Semantic Information System, Service Innovation

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IV

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1-1 Information System Research Framework ... 8

Figure 2-1 Feeling Experience Mode ... 16

Figure 3-1 Architecture of Goal Imagery Creation ... 25

Figure 3-2 System Architecture of ImageCons ... 26

Figure 4-1 Conceptual framework of the socio-cultural influence ... 28

Figure 4-2 System Architecture ... 34

Figure 4-3 SMBs‟ Cultural Model ... 37

Figure 4-4 Possible Outcome of Personality from Different Cultural Dimensions ... 47

Figure 4-5 The Schematic Diagram of Dynamic Questionnaire System ... 48

Figure 4-6 The Relationship between Cultural Traits and Cultural Interpretations ... 50

Figure 4-7 Entity-Relationship Model of Cultural Traits and Cultural Interpretations51 Figure 4-8 The Semantic Relationship of Cultural Interpretations Classification ... 54

Figure 4-9 An Example of the DISCO Method ... 55

Figure 4-10 The 12 Most Similarity Words to the Word “Palm” ... 56

Figure 4-11 Cultural Interpretations Classified Algorithm ... 57

Figure 4-12 Similarity between Cultural Interpretations and Cultural Traits ... 58

Figure 4-13 The Ten Types of Innovation ... 59

Figure 4-14 Recommend Cultural Interpretations Algorithm ... 63

Figure 5-1-1 ImageCons-On Stage Flow ... 69

Figure 5-1-2 ImageCons-Back Stage Flow... 69

Figure 5-2-1 Model Ron‟s Cultural Traits-1 ... 71

Figure 5-2-2 Model Ron‟s Cultural Traits-2 ... 72

Figure 5-3-1 Check Ron‟s Business Status Quo ... 74

Figure 5-4-1 Evaluate and Suggest Ron Cultural Interpretations-1... 76

Figure 6-2-2-1-1 Ruei-Yao Wang‟s Blog Article Numbers of Each Oriented Articles 85 Figure 6-2-2-1-2 Ruei-Yao Wang‟s Monthly Total View of Each Oriented Articles ... 85

Figure 6-2-2-1-3 Yahoo! Campaign Blog‟s Article Numbers of Each Oriented Articles ... 87

Figure 6-2-2-1-4 Yahoo! Campaign Blog‟s Monthly Total View of Each Oriented Articles ... 87

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VII

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2-1 The Main Characteristics of Chinese Business Style Influenced By the Three

Doctrines ... 12

Table 2-2 The Hostel in Chinkuashi Case of apply Feeling Experience Mode ... 17

Table 4-1 Zero-Order Correlations between Mean NEO-PI-R Factors and Culture Scores across 33 Countries ... 45

Table 4-2 Personalities and 24 Cultural Traits ... 52

Table 4-3 Cultural Traits Table ... 53

Table 4-4 Service Statue Quo Questions and Service Innovation Types ... 61

Table 5-1-1 The Detail Information About the SMB for Scenario Application... 68

Table 6-2-2-2-1 The Exemplar Articles and its Cultural Interpretations ... 88

Table 6-2-2-2-2 The Exemplar Articles and its Cultural Interpretations ... 90

Table 6-3-2-1 The Basic Information of Interview Objects in Zhen-Shan Village ... 99

Table 6-3-2-2 The Information of Interview Participants and Interview Data ... 100

Table 6-3-3-1 Interview Data for Support Proposition 1-a ... 104

Table 6-3-3-2 Interview Data for Support Proposition 1-b ... 109

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VIII

LIST OF EXHIBITS

Exhibit 1 The Power Distance Societal Norm ... 120

Exhibit 2 The Uncertainty Avoidance Societal Norm ... 121

Exhibit 3 The Masculinity Societal Norm ... 122

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background and Motivation

In the 21st Century, era of innovation knowledge-based economic which becomes a whole new tendency of global economy. Therefore, the cultural development in every country all effected by the trend of globalization, which also leads the policy of “Think Globally, Act Locally”, spring up like mushrooms (Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan, 2004). In other words, when the market concerning about “globalization”, design tends to concern “localization”, and we must “think globally” for the market, but “act locally” for design (Ko et al., 2009). Since 1990, the development of urban and regional has paying close attention to the development of cultural industry in the global community(Wynne, 1992; O'Connor, 1998). In the last two to three decades, many western countries such as United States and Western Europe all focused on the development of cultural activities as an economic strategy, since it has become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration. (Kong, 2000). In other words, local cultures could be leveraged to contribute to the variation of economic activities, and economic activities in some particular places are also an essential part of culture-generating and innovation (Kong, 2000).

In addition, lots of metropolitan cities like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc. all regard their local cultural as unique and important assets and to promote their commercial activities in a vivid way (Feng, 2002). Not only to coordinate with the government policy and economic development but also to make the people widely value their local culture, we should make an effort to develop local cultural industries through the way of combining with some economic activities represented as service innovation for SMBs (i.e., small and medium-size business). For the reason that small

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organizations tend to be more flexible and higher tolerant to adapt and improve and can accept or even implement change more easily (Damanpour, 1992). Furthermore, it could be more easily to attain innovation in small than in large organizations (Nord & Tucker, 1987) since it requires associating with different parts of an organization to do innovation (Mintzberg, 1979).

We can view the cultural demand as a new blood to present on traditional products or services for innovation and make the industries characterized with local characteristics link up with leisure or tourism industry, in order to inject new vitality to the locality (Zhong et al., 2008). In spite of the fact that innovation is intangible (i.e., it cannot be touched, heard, tasted or seen), it can be felt. It is probably best described as a speculation that enables business to see beyond the present and create the bright future (Ahmed, 1998). When it comes to a business or an organization, innovation not only connects to all parts of the organizations but to all aspects of its operations; for this reason, it comprises all types of innovations. Moreover, to innovate is an adoption to embrace the commencement, development and implementation of the new ideas or actions (Damanpour, 1992).

However, some SMBs know how to use culture as a fresh blood in their service, to convey to the customer. For example, in Taiwan some SMBs foster local cultural development through the cultural festival activities, such as ”Yingge Ceramics” as a service innovation (Zhong et al., 2008), but others don‟t. Many SMBs face the gap between linking their business to the local culture. In this research, we aim to understand the linkage and find a suitable way to do innovation by leveraging the local culture. To leverage local culture by business, there is a need to know the impact of culture to economic activities accordingly.

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of culture influence and how they were related to individuals. In the field of psychological anthropology, culture and personality or personality and culture became the classic name (Hofstede and McCrae, 2004). These works have provided us with some useful information, such as Hofstede‟s (2001) five cultural dimensions emphasizing the significance of culture on business communications. That five cultural dimensions enable to understand that nationality differences will contribute the value differences (Hofstede, 1994) The literature that Hofstede provided was full of discussions surrounding the definitions of “culture”, which can be defined as the collective programming of the mind (i.e., culture‟s mental programming) that differentiates the members of one class of people from those of another (Hofstede, 1984) and focusing on the culture‟s mental programming which could form by the determining of the types of thinking, feeling, and acting. Hofstede conceptualized culture as „programming of the mind‟ in the sense that certain cultures will breed certain reaction based on the distinguished between the primary values of the members of different cultures (Smith et al., 2004) The model of Hofstede‟s (2001) five cultural dimensions is the theoretical foundation and implication for us to explore the relationship between culture and its usability.

The majority of literature in the effect of culture has focused on the cross-cultural problem in the multinational workplace. Several studies have examined the relationship between culture and customer‟s service quality evaluation. Nevertheless, few studies have been done on the effect of local cultural on the way of SMBs‟ to provide their service and do innovation.

In the light of the numerous studies were carried out the effectiveness of culture effect, such as (Gray & Imrie, 2008) discussed about the influence of the socio-cultural environment on service quality evaluation, the whole paper is focusing

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on understanding “how” and “what” cultural (i.e., rules, norms, practices) influence on both service quality evaluation and consumers evaluate the service. In the other paper also pointed out that the communication on marketing does reflect specific cultures (Baack, Singh, 2007). It is reasonable for us to assume that local culture have a degree of impact on how SMBs express impression or service idea to the customer. Since cultural comprise many dimensions such as beliefs, lifestyles, regional, etc. The concept of culture can be derived from anthropology and is in tune with the entire archetype of human behavior, including languages, thoughts, actions and related artifacts. Furthermore, it‟s passed on by the human ability to learn and transfer knowledge from generation to generation (Chiu et al., 2010). Those cultural dimensions may have some impact on each individual to form their values. In consequence, when people found organizations, they will show their cultural values on the characteristics of these foundations (Tayeb, 1988). That is, the owners who run the SMBs will also have their own value delivered to their customer.

In other words, we propose the idea and impression that SMBs want to indicate to their customers and do innovation as an interpretation of local cultural influence. Here we call these ideas and impression as “Cultural Interpretations”. We aim to diminish the gap of SMBs to link their business to the local culture through the method of adopting “Cultural Interpretation” as the hint to engage innovations.

1.2 Research Question

For the purpose of diminishing the gap between SMBs and local culture, we discover that there are some valuable research questions that still remain unanswered. To that end, the following questions were posed:

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[2] Whether we can incorporate such social cultural drivers (i.e., cultural interpretations) into the way that SMBs design their service innovations?

The following section will come up with the reason why we addressed these two research questions.

1.3 Research Purpose

One of the goals of the research presented in this article is to address the significance of the influence on the local culture to SMBs and know how SMBs convey the idea and impression to customers by the effect of cultural influence. The other one is to present a conceptual framework for linking culture and service innovations. To accomplish these goals, the more detailed and exact purposes are introduced in the following:

(1) Identifying the dimensions of local culture which could build one‟s value and have impact on the way of individual thinking and acting toward others.

(2) Building the “Cultural Interpretations” database that can assist SMBs (users) to know the effect of cultural on convey values, emotions and behaviors, etc.

(3) Determining the chance of SMBs to do service innovation after knowing their Cultural Interpretations, to light up their way of doing innovation which evolves with local culture.

1.4 Research Method

In this study, we would like to build an information system that can analyze how local cultural influence SMBs and then propose the “Cultural Interpretations” that SMBs could show through the influence of culture. For the reason that we view

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cultural interpretations as the words that SMBs express their values, emotions and behavior through the culture lens, we exploit a semantic perspective in order to achieve this goal.

For semantics, the human brain has a tremendous capability to acquire and deal with knowledge from experience. For example, the feature shapes, colors and textures distinguished, movement, sounds and smells tell, and the other objects actions in the environment, all of these must all be learned from the experience. The knowledge described above is represented symbolically in the language and can be the cause or the basis of our understanding of word meanings (Binder et al., 2009). These relationships between words and the stores of knowledge they denote can view as the semantics of a language (Bréal, 1897). In addition, the following are some reasons that we use semantic perspective in our system:

(1) The role of social web application and explicit semantics is not anymore a technical one from the view of the enterprises and it may also purvey new answers to business and may also leads to a whole new business models (Hoegg et al., 2006).

(2) Because of the semantic point of view, the focus should be broaden to the phenomenon where humans interact with each other‟s and technology is only in between, not playing the main role (Fill, 2009).

(3) The semantic level with all types of interactions can describe the meaning transmitted with input and output (Shneiderman, 1993).

As the reasons that we mentioned above, we can know that applying semantic in our system will help our mechanism to be ones equally conducted by human and machines. Our main purpose is to analyze the cultural and develop social cultural driver such as cultural interpretations that we mentioned before. Especially our

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research is to focus on the impact of the cultural to the individual, and thus culture is some kind an abstract concept that is hard to measure or even to weight. That is, we implement semantics in our system in order to interpret the cultural input as the social cultural driver (i.e., cultural interpretation) output.

1.5 Research Contribution

As what we mentioned in the previous paragraphs, we addressed three research purposes, which includes identifying the dimensions of local cultural which would impact individuals, building the “cultural interpretation” database that can make SMBs know the influence of culture context on them, and the last but not the least through knowing the cultural impact on the SMBs and then analyzing how those cultural interpretation can lead SMBs to do innovation on their current service. When the time we accomplish the research purposes, we also creates the following contributions attempted:

(1) In this research, come up with a local cultural model which can describe the main local culture context that have influenced individual to think, act or even their inner behavior.

(2) Bring up the social cultural drivers (i.e., cultural interpretations) that might influence SMBs or lead SMBs to do innovation.

(3) Implement those social cultural drivers into the practical, utilizing those social cultural drivers as hints and guidelines for SMBs to do different type of service innovation based on culture.

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8 1.6 Content Organization

The research framework of this study is shown below as Figure 1-1, which is composed of three segments: environment, IS research and knowledge base.

Figure 1-1 Information System Research Framework (Hever et al., 2004) This content of this dissertation is divided into the following part:

 Chapter 1 – Introduction

Describe the environment or the situation that we are discussing and researching for. The environment defines the context that the research problem or the phenomena of interest occurs (Hever et al., 2004). The environment is composed by three parts: people, organizations and technology. Similarly, in our research, people refer to the SMB owners, who face the pressure of survival or who want to break through the current status but do not know how to do; organization can be viewed as the strength, advantage, strategies, structure and culture they currently have, that can represent SMB‟s enterprise spirit and characteristic;

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technology here represents SMB‟s existing or planned technology, which can make them manage the business more smoothly and also help them enlarge their capabilities. After the environment analysis, we can see the lack and need of the SMB.

 Chapter 2 – Literature Review

To survey and collect the previous related research to this study, such as the relationship between cultural influence, personality and service innovation. We view these former research as our foundations, by knowing the existing related research by their merit and inadequate can accelerate us to conduct our research.  Chapter 3 – Motivation Application

In this chapter we will depict the prior related research and then provide the whole picture of our research project and demonstrate the function of this study within the whole research project context.

 Chapter 4 – A Semantic – Based Service Innovations Recommend Mechanism In this chapter we elaborate the conceptual framework that lead the development of our system and the architecture of the semantic-based innovation recommend system. Besides the description and the explanation of detail design and methodology, the components of relates research problem will also address here.  Chapter 5 – Application Scenario

In this chapter, we demonstrate an application scenario to show how to use our system, and we also present our back stage flow to explain the mechanism of our on stage process.

 Chapter 6 – Evaluations

To evaluate our propositions, in this chapter, here we use blog analysis to justify our assumption and furthermore we use interview data to evaluate our

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propositions. We expect to justify our propositions via the process of encoding the raw data which we got from the in-depth interview.

 Chapter 7 – Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter is to conclude our research contribution and the implications of our research. Moreover, the limitation and future research of our study will also be addressed in this chapter.

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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

In Chapter 2, we provide the background of the previous relevant research addressing cultural influence and SMBs, cultural influence and service innovation, and semantic information system for establishing the foundation and the position of our proposed idea about the local culture‟s influences on SMBs and how SMBs convey the idea and impression to the customers. The first part is to know the relationship between cultural influence and SMBs by examining the existing research about how culture influence SMBs‟ management, such as service offering and decision making. Following the discussion about how cultural influence SMBs, a review of cultural and service innovation needs to be addressed here, and these literatures are provided to conceive the importance and the trend of culture industry development and service innovation, and illustrate the interrelationship between culture and service innovation. Finally, the introduction of semantic information system is given to know the whole architecture and process of our research building. Chapter 2 has three intentions: First, we review the cultural influence on SMBs different aspects. Second, we examine the trend of cultural innovation and the relationship of SMBs‟ cultural background. The third is to describe the technology we adopt to build our research system and the architecture.

2.1 Culture and SMBs

People grow up in different countries, in different periods, and the ideas they come out cannot help but reflect the effect of their environment (Hofstede, 1993). When the ideas and decision come out from the SMBs, we can call it the management of their business. However, the definition of management differs from one country to the other, and it should take local conditions such as historical and cultural to consider

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and understand its process, problems and school of thought; moreover, it is also related to religion and to beliefs about science (Hofstede, 1993). Taking Chinese culture for example, in general, religion plays an important role on the traditional Chinese culture; they affect individual‟s thought and government policy (Yu & Miller, 2003). Yu and Miller (2003) summarized the main characteristics of Chinese business/management style which is under influences of three doctrines (religion) as shown in Table 2-1 below.

Table 2-1 The Main Characteristics of Chinese Business Style Influenced By the Three Doctrines (Yu & Miller, 2003)

In the Table 2-1, it shows the business style of different Chinese belief, due to its different doctrine, coming out to be different business style. For example, the business style of Buddhism is obey, trust, moral and stable mentality; however, in the Taoism, it becomes control, collectivism and hierarchy and the business style of Confucianism is more focus on the friendship, network and loyalty.

In addition, different cultures will contribute to different types of good service behaviors (Winsted, 1997). The good service behaviors can be viewed as one of the management or business style of SMBs in terms of the way the SMBs contribute. As we mentioned earlier, the management will be different due to the different of local conditions, such as cultural, historical, religion, etc. Hence, Hofstede‟s (1993) culture study mentioned that culture can be described in five dimensions, and we can use this to make some predictions on the way to know their society operates, including

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management. For the reason that the research of Hofstede is based on the employee‟s working attitude, and the employee here also includes the management level, who has the responsibility to do the management task in the film. Therefore, According to Hofstede‟s research, each of these cultural dimensions all has two opposing sides, as illustrated in below (Hofstede, 1994):

(1) Power Distance: It can be defined as the inequality between people. In high power distance, people can easily accept unequal, however; in low power distance, people are relatively equal.

(2) Uncertainty Avoidance: It can be defined as the degree of tolerance for structured or unstructured situations. For the people living in a country, structured situation are those with the clear rules and guides to tell ones how to act and behave; in contrast, unstructured situation are the things which with ambiguous situation and people cannot easily predict what it will be in the future. The people who have high uncertainty avoidance will tend to be more nervous energy, and the people who have low uncertainty avoidance will show more curious about the new things.

(3) Masculinity: It can be defined as the manlier role, which values success, competition and ambition, etc higher than everything in their life. The opposite of the masculinity is femininity, which refers to more gentle roles, such as caring, well relationship maintaining, etc.

(4) Individualism: It can be defined as the degree of people who prefer to work alone or to be in a team work. That is, the opposite of individualism is collectivism. (5) Long-term Oriented: It can be defined as the values oriented which people find

towards the future. Long-term oriented one considers the value which he can find more in the future; nevertheless, the one who is short-term oriented will consider

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finding the value more in the present or the past.

Besides Hofstede (1993), Adler (1991) also proposed the culture and behavior cycle theory to demonstrate how culture (values, beliefs and attitudes) influences management behavior. Furthermore, not only the management style, the guidance of individuals‟ decision making is given by cultures different rules and principles (Donnel A. Briley et al., 2000). Additionally, Donnel A. Briley et al., (2000) still mentioned that “cultural differences in the frequency of generating particular types of reasons mediated the difference in choices.” Cultures differences include the patterns of decision making, how the individual is related to each other, and ways in completing works and responding to change (Meen, 1995). The decision making rules and principles that an individual possesses are derived from their cultural knowledge (Donnel A. Briley et al., 2000). We should have both knowledge and empathy of the entire local scene in order to understand and realize the management in a country (Hofstede, 1993).

With the previous review of related research, we can realize that different culture will cultivate different business management style, and it can approve that culture do effect SMBs. Therefore, to further understand the effect of culture to the SMBs management style (i.e. decision making, service offering) in Taiwan, our study intends to develop a examine model , which includes the different dimensions (social cultural embodied, religion, social relationship) of Taiwan‟s local culture context and Hofstede‟s cultural dimensions and Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), in order to realize Taiwan SMBs local culture and how local culture effect SMB‟s business behavior.

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15 2.2 Culture and Service Innovation

Culture and creative industries are getting more and more attention now, there are many different policy regimes that come to support and promote the development of culture and creative industries (Cunningham, 2002). Additionally, many western countries focused on the development of local cultural activities (Kong, 2000). In order to develop culture industries, we can combine creativeness with the local culture and then produce a series of service and products innovation (Zhong et al., 2008). “The definition of service innovation in firms can be characterized by changes in (1) the service concept, (2) client interface, (3) delivery systems and (4) technological options. (J.P.J de Jong et al., 2003)” Service innovation can be an idea for a performance in offering customers a sufficient appealing new benefit (Berry et al., 2006). After knowing that we can use service innovation to facilitate the development of culture industries and give customers a whole new experience. The following is the practical example about utilizing culture to do service innovation in order to develop cultural industry.

Nearly, Taiwan government is working hard on facilitate the development of culture and creative industry; they focus on how to utilize culture to form a series of creative design. The relationship of culture and industry is becoming closer and closer. For industry, adding the elements of culture can create the core value of the products; for culture, industry can be the energy to facilitate the development of culture (Lin & Lin, 2009). And we are looking forward of the product value added within the utilization of culture (Lin & Lin, 2009). Lin (2009) proposed that we should transfer culture and creative industry to the industry which is based on the service innovation and with the intrusion of local culture, technology and aesthetics. According to Lin‟s (2008) integrative creative living industry research model, it demonstrated that if we

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want to develop culture and creative industry, we have to facilitate and design it with creativity in order to become a good feeling experience to the customers. The following Figure 2-1, it displays a process of create a story of the service and then empathizes customers with the atmosphere created by the server, in order to let customers feel impressed and happy to the service (Lin, 2011). Lin (et. al., 2010 c) wants to use this model to know the hostel case of Chinkuashi, how they utilize the elements of local culture and the innovation of service to impress and convey their caring to the customers.

Figure 2-1 Feeling Experience Mode (Lin et.al, 2010c)

This hostel located in Chinkuashi, the place which is full of the historical remains, beautiful scenery and the beauty of humanities spirit and local culture; it takes time to feel and sense with heart slowly (Lin et. al., 2010 c). Accordingly, Lin (2011) used this hostel to show the practical operation of feeling experience mode, as indicated in Table 2-2.

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Table 2-2 The Hostel in Chinkuashi Case of apply Feeling Experience Mode (Lin et. al., 2010 c) It has five rows in Table 2-2. The first row is the description of “sense”, which means the service that they offer to the customer will satisfy customer‟s sense, includes high quality infrastructure service, customized room smelling and treating customer like close friend. The second row is about the “feeling” such as the hostel offering very warm and heart-touched room which will make tourist to remind the trip after or some short words but will arouse the deep feeling of the readers. The third row is about “thinking” such as the hostel trying to inspire customer to think about the culture of that area, and to think about what will be the souvenir to memorize the place. The fourth row is about “active” such as the hostel of Chinkuashi wanting to create their place as a place which can make customers feel relaxed, cozy and fulfill their energy. The last flow is the most important one called “relevance” such as the hostel viewing the interaction with customers and their service evaluation feedback importantly, and expecting to provide the service which is start from the heart (Lin et. al., 2010 c). In this case, it introduces new service innovation into the business model in order to make customers impressed and then the creative living industry can become sustainable management. Moreover, Lin (2011) also pointed out that we have to utilize culture and technology on the design of living style and living originality, in order to elevate the competitive strength of the design industry.

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The above case demonstrates the example of connecting culture and service innovation together to guide the growth and competitive strength of the design industry. However, knowing the importance of service innovation is not enough, there are many aspects influencing the result of service innovation, especially” people”. We have to know that to support service innovation, people are the key point of new service development success or not (J.P.J de Jong et al., 2003), especially when we want to utilize the local cultural with service innovation.

If we want to utilize the local culture, and then achieve the goal of develop local cultural industries by service innovation; we then have to know the people there deeply. For the reason that people are influenced by their culture background; the culture context will contribute different mental programming determines the type of people‟s thinking, feeling and acting (Hofstede, 1984). Accordingly, knowing the people who deliver and create the new service innovation is important. In the small and medium-size business, the owner operates and dominates the firm, their culture background such as beliefs, attitudes will affect the way they manage and organize the business work; and furthermore, owner‟s underlying culture–influenced beliefs and attitudes would influence the changes of the business (Bhaskaran, 2006). For example, if people grow up in a collectivistic culture, they were more likely to cooperate and interact with others, and it can reflect on their work attitude (Mannix & Neale, 2005). In addition, the culture-influenced beliefs, attitudes and the way they respond to service innovation also are influenced by the business skills, personal contact networks that SMBs develop and access (Bhaskaran, 2006). That is, both culture and personal characteristics nurture the performance of innovative products (Scott & Bruce, 1994).

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is to utilize culture to find a new way of innovation, and can be done through a series of service innovation by people. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of local culture industry development, we have to know the people first because people are the one who execute the service innovation and people are the one who are influenced by their culture context. In our case, the people who perform the service innovation is the owner of SMBs; that is, we have to know the culture influence on the SMBs and how culture affect SMBs to do service innovation and develop local culture industry. However, limited studies have described the kind of value or attitude that is fulfilled by SMBs doing service innovation based on culture. Consequently, we propose a concept of “cultural interpretation”, it is an interpretation of local culture context influence which means the impression and the idea that SMBs want to express to their customers and do service innovation. We intend to achieve the goal of utilizing local culture to do service innovation and cultural industry development by adopting the concept of cultural interpretation as a guide and hint to stimulate the possibility of SMBs‟ service innovation.

2.3 Semantic Information System

In general, information systems are used to present, reflect or imitate the activities, phenomena in the real world (Weber, 1997). These phenomena and activities comprise the business technology and human activities, such as supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, etc (Fill, 2009). The optimal balance between business requirement and technological opportunity is to use social and semantic technologies in business demand (Fill, 2009). The term of semantic signifies that when the system is processing it will take the meaning of the information into account (Fill, 2006). Accordingly, when we use

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information system, it comes to the interaction between human and computers and we would think about the interaction of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels (Fill, 2009). Furthermore, with all types of the interactions, to clearly describe the meaning conveyed with input and output in the semantic level is very vital (Shneiderman, 1993). The inclusion of semantics in the information systems can be regarded as a helper to ease the work and operate with the large amount of information and data (Fill, 2006).

After the brief introduction about the semantic information system, we know that we can use the perspective of semantic to facilitate the data operating work in the information system. The whole concept of our system is a semantic perspective information system. The semantic perspective indicates that the way we store our data is based on its semantic aspect rather than the way data are stored. We use ontology to capture the semantic of information; it can be presented in a formal language and can be used to store the related metadata, in order to achieve the information collection from the approach of semantic (Fonseca, 2001). Because that we have to deliver the information that the user is expecting, such as their cultural interpretations, it is necessary and have to catch the meaning of the entities of the cultural interpretations. Therefore, the term semantic in our information system is used to refer to the basic meaning of our entities (i.e. cultural interpretations). We use semantic to assist us to collect and classify our cultural interpretations into the right subclass of cultural traits in our database. For the purpose that we can attain the words which is similarity related to the cultural traits, they can be conveyed to our SMBs users.

That is, in our research, we will build a semantic information system to analyze SMBs culture background and recommend them cultural interpretations. To achieve this goal, we have to require a lot of information to build up the cultural

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interpretations database; therefore, we will use semantic technology here to assist us. This chapter has reviewed literature from three issues–culture and SMBs, culture and service innovation and semantic information system, those three issues are all relevant to the aim of our research and this thesis. Those literature reviews give us a background and depiction about the present research which relevant to our study. We can summarize three points as follows:

(1) Culture and SMBs: Culture influences the way SMBs manage and do decision making is obviously. Therefore, to understand how culture influences SMBs is important.

(2) SMBs and service innovation: Culture influence people, people influence the performance of innovation. Since culture innovation is a trend, the best way to develop local culture industry is to know the local culture of the SMBs and finding the best way for them to utilize the local culture as a new service innovation.

(3) Tool: To achieve the goal of our research, we will develop a semantic technology based information system for us to deal with the data and information from the SMBs and the collect of cultural interpretations.

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CHAPTER 3 MOTIVATION APPLICATION

The purpose of this chapter is to give the whole picture of our research project which called –“ImageCons”. The chapter will be composed with three parts. First, we describe the previous research called uVoyage. This part will provide what uVoyage found and their motivation. Second, we describe the conceptual framework of our project which is based on the approach of sign value and design thinking. Third, we elaborate our project – “ImageCons” and how we could fulfill the shortage of uVoyage and also point out the role and design of the semantic perspective of culture modeling approach within this framework.

3.1 The previous research of Uvoyage

In this part we will describe the finding and the shortage of uVoyage, to show the significance of our project. The commonality of uVoyage and ImageCons is they all based on the concept of sign value and design thinking. Sign value and design thinking were addressed together into service system design by “Service system design & delivery” (Yuan, 2011). uVoyage is more focusing on the delivery of the images for both tourists and regional tourism SMBs. At the time of regional tourism SMBs entering destination images; they can use images to search for potential partners to cooperate. Similarly, tourists can meet their expectation of trips by matching their wanted images to the destination tourism SMB providers. However, it is still have a gap between for SMB providers to identify their appropriate images and then convey it out. Overall, the results seem to warrant two findings:

(1) SMBs know it is important and necessary to do service innovation, no matter in alliance with other partnership or meeting customer‟s expectation.

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images which can guide them to do service innovation.

After knowing the contribution made by the uVoyage and the inadequate, we can easily infer that most SMBs are lacking direction, resources to guide them, to make them knowing themselves, such as their core competence, advantage and strength. Therefore, in order to complement the shortage of the previous research, ImageCons is brought up to fulfill the part of inspiring SMBs to create their own goal imagery clearly, and to implement their goal image based on the sign-value approach. ImageCons research will focus on the service delivery part in the tourist industry.

3.2 The Conceptual Framework of the Sign Value Approach and Design Thinking

The ImageCons proposed here in the service journey is to drive SMBs to create and compose their service innovation imagery. Since this project is a process about service delivery and imagery creating, the goal is to create SMBs‟ image of service innovation. That is, we call those images as goal imagery. Goal imagery is created by an open value-network which is based on the environment interaction patterns, cultural influences analysis and then tested by the story prototype to facilitate the effectiveness of goal imagery.

Yuan (2011) addressed that the sign value approach is for the goal imagery creation, aim to provide the methods, models, tools or even theories that can foster SMBs to create and come up with its own goal imagery. Moreover, the approach adopted design thinking to assist in achieving practical and creative solution of the goal imagery creation. All of these are for the goal of imagery creation and meeting the need of drive business success.

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(1) Understanding the context of interaction pattern with other possible cooperation partners and knowing SMB social-cultural behavior which can relate or give SMBs direction to do service innovation on the FPOD (i.e., finance, process, offering, delivery).

(2) Motivating SMB with mini moving story (less than 100 words) communication, the mini story is composed by the material from the previous understanding phase, it might just be a slogan or a short sentence, the goal here is to convince and stimulate SMB to believe that they do really can create their own imagery after reading the mini story. After that, SMB are willing to participate into the ImageCons service design journey.

(3) Inspiring stands for the inner intangible level rehearsal of the selected and focusing on the innovation.

(4) Co-developing goal imagery aims to establish and provide imagery model, the imagery bank (i.e., knowledge base) will be evolved in this stage as a co-creation network. By get through the co-creation can assist and facilitate SMB create their goal imagery with their customers and potential appropriate collaborators.

(5) Accessing the goal imagery is to excogitate the measure models in order to identify and evaluate the gap between goal image and current status quo of the SMB context.

(6) Testing the goal imagery here is using a prototyping way to verify the created goal imagery, using an interactive story prototyping way (the combination of finance, process, offering and delivery lead to the goal imagery delivery) to let SMBs rethink their service innovation goal imagery and find the possibility of service innovation.

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Figure 3-1 Architecture of Goal Imagery Creation

3.3 The System Architecture of ImageCons

There are mainly five modules in ImageCons as shown in Figure 3-2. The modules of interaction pattern analysis and cultural analysis are associated to the first stage of the goal imagery creation. These two modules attempt to analyze SMB‟s interaction patterns and social-cultural influence after collecting the SMB‟s related input information, for the purpose of inspiring SMB and to let them believe that they can use the strength and advantage they have to do service innovation on the FPOD (i.e., finance, process, offering, delivery). Evaluating the input information module and motivating story generation module are the designs for convincing and moving SMB to believe they really can create their own goal imagery by using the motivating story which is composed based on the input information from the previous stage. Additionally, when the time SMB engage in a service-design journey with the effect

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of motivating story module, SMB will get into the goal imagery evaluation module and imagery co-creation interaction module. These two modules are interacting with each other‟s, in order to affirm the goal imagery of SMB by doing evolution and interaction. Imagery assessment and prototyping story interaction are two parallel modules but still will interact with the other; in the imagery assessment module is to first, macro imagery evaluation for fast story prototyping. Second, identify and quantify the gap between goal imagery and the expecting service imagery of the SMB. Following, SMB can compare multi service imageries and extract imagery elements in order to reorganize its service imagery; in the prototyping story interaction module is to test goal imagery through the story prototyping way in order to find the possibility of service innovation.

Figure 3-2 System Architecture of ImageCons

Our target users are focusing on the regional tourism SMBs. Focusing on those who want to do service innovation or to impress their customers no matter by their service or by the atmosphere they build. That is, the SMB owners of regional tourism

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service provider want to build an attractive and special imagery to their customer according to the goal imagery that we would like to help them to create. In essence, the overall system process is to model the social-cultural influence and interaction patterns with other cooperated partners, trying to find and sustain SMB‟s current strengths and to search out and create opportunities by creating their own goal imagery. Once SMBs create their own goal imagery, which represents the feeling and vision of them, SMBs can view it as their brand perception.

Overall, we tend to help SMBs to think about their service innovation through creating their own goal imagery and using the goal imagery to recommend SMBs to implement any aspect of FPOD (i.e., finance, process, offering, delivery).

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CHAPTER 4 A SEMANTIC-BASED SERVICE INNOVATIONS

RECOMMEND MECHANISM

4.1 Conceptual Framework

The underlying conceptual framework of our study is shown in Figure 4-1 prescribing the basic concepts (SMB socio-culture context, socio-cultural behavior, cultural traits shaping, cultural interpretation awareness, socio-cultural service presentation) guiding our system design and the interrelationships (arrow <1>~<4>) between each other.

The primary goal of our research is to light up SMB‟s way of doing service innovation with local cultural elements after knowing the impacts of the socio-cultural on themselves. Therefore, the intention of this conceptual model is to rationalize our research goal. In Figure 4-1, we assume that the service way SMBs present within the merge of socio-cultural is our main target to achieve, that is to say, knowing the outputs of SMB socio-culture context and behavior are two important points in this process.

Figure 4-1 Conceptual framework of the socio-cultural influence

SMB Socio-Culture context: The socio-culture context here denotes the SMB‟s cultural background, which include their local lifestyle, practices, tradition, social contacts, norms and value, ideas, cultural identity, etc (Chiesura & De Groot, 2003).

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By the same token, it can be viewed as SMB‟s social and psychological context. The socio-culture context might influence SMBs invisibly, but it does. For example, the SMBs who came from different socio-culture context may have different understanding of well-being and different emotional components of its attitude and viewpoint toward the whole natural environment.

SMB Socio-Cultural Behavior: The socio-cultural behavior here is a kind of living style; it may include your favored behavior, habitual activities or even implicit routines. Some behaviors are implicit, but some are explicit. When it comes to the explicit one, it comprises favored behavior and habitual activities, the behavior acted by SMBs or the activities participated by SMBs. We argue that those activities may have some intangible impact on SMBs. For example, the SMB who is very fascinated by Taiwan‟s traditional opera, he goes to see the show almost every month; for him, it is not only a show, and it is a lifestyle; he introduced the traditional opera‟s spirit into his business and his value toward the natural environment.

Arrow<1>and<2>: Both arrows pointing out to the same component, which called SMB‟s cultural traits shaping. Our research will show both socio-culture context and socio-cultural behavior do really contribute to ones‟ cultural traits. In order to demonstrate the shaping process of SMB‟s cultural traits, SMB‟s socio-culture context and behavior are necessary to discuss.

SMB’s Cultural Traits Shaping: To find out cultural impact on SMBs, a logical and supported inference is the requirement. As mentioned in Chapter 1, cultural may contribute to one‟s value and behavior. In addition, every behavior, attitude, value, norms, etc., can be traced to the traits that ones have. However, the domain of traits is too broad, and we can not only use cultural background or activities to define ones traits. Therefore, the traits we discuss here are more focusing on those which

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contributed by the cultural part, and we call it “cultural traits”. Cultural traits signify both cultural and personality traits (Hinenoya et al., 2000). That is, cultural and personality traits are in a tight relationship, according to the five factor theory of personality (i.e. five factor model) (McCrae & Costa, 1996, 1999). In other words, the shape of personality traits can be influenced by culture, and the idea of some psychological anthropology also presumes that cultural is constitutive of personality (Miller, 1999).

Miller (1999) mentioned that culture is sometimes defined as a casual relationship bearing under individual psychological processes. These processes can be adapted to individual psychological requirements, or vice versa. More specifically, both genetic and environmental influence shape personality, among the most important and significance of the environmental influence is cultural influence (Triandis & Suh, 2002). Accordingly, we argue that each SMB has its own cultural traits, since they came from different culture context and have evolved into different cultural behavior. The goal in this SMBs cultural traits shaping concept is to shape each SMB‟s cultural traits by analyzing SMB‟s culture, circumstance and cultural activities participated.

Arrow<3>: Although SMB‟s cultural traits shaping regards SMB‟s personality traits being created for the psychology part, we still do not know what SMBs would act or behave in line with its cultural traits. This arrow is concerns about what the cultural trait would manifest or represent itself in terms of either an action or self-awareness. Cultural Interpretations Awareness: Unlike SMB‟s cultural traits shaping being more toward the psychology side, cultural interpretation awareness is more toward the cognitive side. In the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992), the most widely used and researched instrument which was

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developed to measure the Five-Factor Model (Hofstede, McCrae, 2004), it classified personality into five big sectors, called neuroticism (N), extraversion (E), openness to experience (O), agreeableness (A) and conscientiousness (C), and each personality was defined by six specific traits. For example, personality openness includes fantasy trait, aesthetics trait, feelings trait, actions trait, ideas trait and value trait. People will act in some way to represent their traits; however, they have to bear the awareness first and then act it. We can see the process of forming awareness is a cognitive way. Cognition is a way of gathering, processing and evaluating information that people get used to or would like to act (Hayes & Allinson, 1998). That is, SMBs have its own traits and it will turn into a cognitive process. Besides, Hayes and Allinson (1998) said cognition affects how people get information from the environment, how they read and organize information and then interpret it, and how they congregate their interpretations into mental model and then guide their actions additionally. In brief, through the cognitive process, SMBs will realize and conceive their behavior presentation.

Arrow<4>: Finally, this arrow concerns how a process transforming SMBs cognition into SMBs behavior presentation, as we mentioned earlier. The process of cognition will gather their interpretations into mental model and then guide their actions, videlicet, and apply this concept in the business field (i.e., SMBs exhibiting their service presentation).

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As we pointed out at the beginning, the gist of the whole paper is trying to strengthen the role of local culture in doing service innovation by letting SMBs know how socio-cultural background influence their thinking and acting and how they can find out and create a brand-new service by using their socio-cultural presentation well and then to even up scarcity and superabundance status quo. For the purpose to achieve these ends, we bring the following Figure 4-2 is to make our system architecture more clearly and easily to comprehend. The design of our system architecture is closely related to the flow of our conceptual model, Figure 4-1, the one which we already noted in Chapter 4.1.

According to the conceptual model, before we shape SMB‟s cultural traits, we have to know their socio-culture context and behavior first. Thus, we proposed model SMB‟s cultural traits as a beginning of our system architecture. The whole process to acquire and figure SMBs‟ socio-cultural information is more like a journey for SMBs to know themselves well and deeper from the angle of culture view. Since the whole research starts from the culture expects to end up with the combination of service and culture, we have to understand the central characteristic of culture and the aspect of socio-cultural is of paramount importance. Consequently, the first step of this system is to model and know SMBs local culture, for the reason that our research is implemented in Taiwan, the model we propose in this research is based on the socio-cultural background in Taiwan.

Next, as we noted above, in the concept model, we knew that culture is closely related to the personal traits, culture can contribute to the shaping of cultural traits. Hence, the last step in the model SMB‟s cultural traits is to classify SMBs‟ cultural traits, and the output of this segment will be those related cultural traits. Moreover,

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traits can be closely associated with personal interpretations awareness. The aim after we get the cultural traits is to generate some recommended cultural interpretations as our result after analyzing SMBs‟ culture context and traits. All of these will result in the “propose knowledge based cultural interpretations” part and “evaluate and suggest cultural interpretations toward cultural service innovation” part in our system architecture.

The final goal addressed in the conceptual model is to know SMB‟s socio-cultural service presentation. One of the purposes of this research is to implement those presentations on SMBs‟ service in reality. That is, in our system architecture, after SMBs got their cultural interpretations, then our system will try to understand SMBs‟ current service status first, in the “rethink and appraise current service status quo” part, and then will give SMBs new inspiration to do service innovation by connecting cultural factors with the ten types of service innovations (Larry Keeley/Doblin Inc., 1999) in the “evaluate and suggest cultural interpretation toward cultural service innovation” part. Once SMBs decides to keep joining in this journey, we have to evaluate its result, especially about their practical operation part, and give them feedback when the time that SMB comes to our system again.

Accordingly, this system architecture is composed by four main parts, which includes model SMB‟s cultural traits, propose knowledge based cultural interpretations, rethink and appraise current service status quo examination, and the last but not the least, evaluate and suggest cultural interpretations based cultural service innovation. These parts are briefly introduced as follows:

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Figure 4-2 System Architecture

(1) Model SMB‟s Cultural Traits

 Purpose: Classify and figure out SMB‟s cultural traits

 Major Input: The information about SMB‟s socio-culture context and behavior

 Components: Use SMB‟s cultural model to assist analysis and classification  Major Output: The cultural traits that SMB‟s have

(2) Propose Knowledge Based Cultural Interpretations  Purpose: Recommend SMB cultural interpretations  Major Input: SMB‟s cultural traits

 Components: Semantic database based recommendation SMBs’ Cultural Model Cultural Interpretations Data Cultural Questionnaire Analysis SMB Socio-Cultural Context Analysis SMB Socio-Cultural Behavior Analysis and Annotation SMB’s Cultural Traits Classification Cultural Interpretations (CI) Recommenation Cultural Interpretations Evaluation & Suggestion Cultural Interpretations Ten Types of Service Innovations (SIT) Analysis and Select SI Module

Model SMB's Cultural Traits

SMB’s Behavior and Cultural Traits

Propose Knowledge Based Cultural Interpretations

Evaluate and Suggest Cultural Interpretations toward Cultural Service Innovation

Rethink and Appraise Current Service Status Quo

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 Major Output: SMB‟s cultural interpretations (3) Rethink and Appraise Current Service Status Quo

 Purpose: Recommend SMB new innovation way through the cultural interpretations

 Major Input: SMB‟s personality and cultural traits result

 Components: Knowing the SMB‟s status quo in the FPOD (i.e. financing, processing, offering, delivery) and give service innovate suggestion to SMB  Major Output: FPOD combine with recommended cultural interpretations (4) Evaluate and Suggest Cultural Interpretations Toward Cultural Service Innovation

 Purpose: Evaluate and suggest the most suitable interpretations to SMB  Major Input: Cultural interpretations

 Components: Evaluate interpretations by mapping them with some FPOD hint sentences

 Major Output: Cultural interpretations from the input which is chosen by SMB

4.3 Model SMB’s Cultural Traits

Model SMB‟s cultural traits are designed for knowing SMBs‟ socio-cultural background, behavior and then classifying those into cultural traits. At the beginning, we will propose a series of questions which are related to the user‟s culture context, and the user needs to offer their information by filling those questions. When the time user finishes the questionnaire answering, we will use our SMBs‟ cultural model to analyze the statements and find out the cultural traits which can characterize our user. Once the cultural traits are suggested, the purpose of this step is completed, it can then move to the next stage of cultural interpretation recommendation.

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In order to know SMBs‟ Taiwan social cultural background, we have to know the knowledge of national culture, because it will give us a big picture about how culture affects people‟s behavior. National culture is a shared experience of those people who come from the same culture context; they will teach their offspring as the way of viewing the world successively (Yu & Miller 2003). These values compose the kernel of the society, and present as the foundation of the attitude and anticipation of the members from this culture (Yu & Miller 2003).Accordingly, the SMB‟s Taiwan cultural model will be developed based on the context of religion, social relationship and socio-cultural behavior, Hofstede‟s model of culture and the revised NEO personality inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) in order to achieve the goal of collecting SMBs‟ culture context information and identify SMBs‟ cultural traits.

This model has three levels of analysis: the first level, cultural background requirement aims to understand the socio-culture context and socio-cultural behavior of SMBs; the second level is to link the outcome of first level to the four dimensions of Hofstede‟s cultural model, because those dimensions seem to reflect the fundamental dimensions of culture from the view of value systems (Inkeles & Levinson, 1969). In addition, we tend to analyze the contributed behavior of socio-cultural influence, and in the third level we adapt the five personality of revised NEO personality inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and link the outcome of second level to those five personality, for the reason that cultural dimensions are from the perspective of the cultural value systems and personality and culture interact to shape the behavior of individuals and social groups (McCrae, 2000). Besides, Church (2000) integrated traits and the approach of cultural psychological to provide a model of personality and culture. “Cultures influence the development of

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personalities”, said by Triandis and Suh (2002). Moreover, there were amount of literature implying that that five personality factors, which includes extraversion(E), openness to experience(O), agreeableness(A), conscientiousness(C) and neuroticism(N) merge in different cultures (Triandis & Suh, 2002). The goal in this level also fulfills the purpose of this model, that is, to find out the cultural traits of SMBs‟. As the previous description of our model, the prototype of this model is shown in the below, Figure 4-3. We will address the detailed description of the relationship between each level in the following paragraph.

Figure 4-3 SMBs‟ Cultural Model SMBs’ Cultural Model

Power Distance

Uncertainty

Avoidance Masculinity Individualism

Conscientiousness (C) Extraversion (E) Openness to Experience (O) Agreeableness (A) Religion *Buddhism *Taoism *Confucianism Social Relationship

*Value of Social Network

(Family Relationship and GuanXi)

Socio-Cultural Embodied

*Habitual Activities