Abstract for: A System Dynamics Approach to Enhance Tourism Service Delivery Performance through Value Co-Creation

Value co-creation is shown to play a prominent role in performance improvement in various sectors ranging from manufacturing to service. However, its role in creating value and consequently improving the performance of service in tourist sector has not been investigated in the literature. In order to bridge this gap and considering the complex and dynamic nature of the tourism industry, this paper, using the SD simulation model, builds models aiming at developing a tourism engagement based value co-creation mechanism. It targets to improve cultural heritage sector performance in terms of service delivery system. Considering a specific case study, Sicily (Italy), the developed models intend to address the tourist’s service delivery experience design. Although system dynamics has been applied to a wide range of problem domains, using it in co-creating value within service delivery design especially in tourism sector is relatively new and is considered one of the main contributions of this study. The main result of this study suggests that incorporating a value co-creation through engagement of tourists, ideation, would enable policy maker to stay in line with tourists needs and invest in accordance with their wishes which leads to significant improvement in quality of the services offered to tourists.