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Many service industries are facing severe labor shortages. As a result, service providers are turning to new sources of labor, such as service robots. Critics however often point out that service robots lack emotional communication capabilities without which they cannot be expected to truly replace human employees and fill the emerging labor market gaps. Here, a research agenda for the investigation of the role of emotional communication by service robots and its effects on customers and their service experience are laid out. This paper aims to propose that research in this area will further understanding of how service robots can add value to service frontlines, engage customers, increasingly replace service employees and ultimately help overcome pressing labor shortages.

A research agenda structured around the three-step emotional communication process (i.e. read, decide and express) and the four emotional communication strategies crucial for service interactions (i.e. mimicking, alleviating, infusing and preventing) are conceptualized.

Three contributions are made. First, the importance of emotional communication by service robots during service interactions is highlighted. Second, interdisciplinary research priorities and opportunities in this emerging field are mapped out. Third, a theoretical structure to connect the findings of future studies is provided.

Service research investigating the role and implications of emotional communication by service robots is scarce. A research agenda to guide the exploration of this crucial, yet underresearched component of customer-robot service interactions is structured and mapped out.

The purpose of this paper is to test the Porter hypothesis using the Structure–Conduct–Performance (SCP) framework for a panel data set of industries in New Zealand.

The authors developed a mutually exclusive classification of the process-led and product-led innovation strategies and examined their impact on SCP in the high (low) carbon emission industries.

The findings show that the high-level concentration provides more beneficial opportunities for product and geographical diversification that require a high level of R&D intensity. The authors find that in high-carbon emission industries, the product-led innovation strategies have a significant positive impact on the industry structure and performance which provide support for the Porter hypothesis.

The findings imply that competition effects firm-level investments, in particular, capital expenditure to address carbon emissions, as such investments give firms a head start over rivals, and increase their profit margin compared to other firms over time. Overall, the empirical results lend support to the Porter hypothesis and suggest that understanding of industries’ unique R&D attributes is critical to developing regulations to support industries in smaller economies.

It is the first study that examines the industry structure, R&D intensity and performance in a small developed economy of New Zealand.