In a recent paper, Benoit et. al. (2019, 525) suggested that there is a "disconnect between the academic and the managerial worlds". Several reasons were giving for this phenomenon (e.g., having different priorities and communication practices). This disconnect is unfortunate as academics and practitioners could benefit significantly from a research collaboration.
Academics could get access to real life data and practitioners, in return, could gain insights from academia. Research collaborations could especially help bridge the practitioneracademic gap as outlined by Lilien (2011) and improve and focus research relevance (Brennan et al, 2014; Zolkiewski, 2018) . Benoit et. al. (2019) also discuss several ways in which the observed disconnect could be overcome. One of the presented solutions is to organise co-creation workshops, which bring "practitioners and academics with an interest in a general research topic together to jointly develop research questions." (Benoit et. al., 2019, 533) . A further advantage of workshops is the potential to make the academic teams interdisciplinary with potential for more creative solutions that can 'make a difference' (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017) . This Journal of Business Research Special Issue emerged from such a workshop, which will be discussed in the next sections.
Widely promoted and planned workshops, within short controlled time-periods, offer an opportunity to bring together a range of scholars from disparate backgrounds, multiple disciplines (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017; Zolkiewski, 2018) and career stages. This crossdiscipline, dialogue driven approach provides an excellent opportunity, via academicpractitioner engagement , to stimulate creative and innovate service research ideas (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017) . It is a good approach to fast track towards research that matters; research that is being used and has an impact on society (Gustafsson et. al., 2015) . Additionally, workshops provide an opportunity for early career researchers to meet and work with more established colleagues (Palmatier, 2017) bringing new blood into research communities.
Companies need to constantly re-innovate themselves and have limited resources to do so. The underlying idea of academic-practitioner workshops is that a company articulates a problem and academics seek to solve it in novel ways. Academics are able to give these companies a rare gift of unbiased input to this problem as, unlike initiatives to create value via co-opetition, no-one is trying to monetise on a solution to a company problem. Academics also bring a more holistic understanding of how business activity generates value. For example, Kunz et al. (2019) highlight that whilst business publications focus on technology, scientific service research focuses more on customer-related technology application. The result of a workshop like this is a typical win-win situation. Academics are given a relevant problem to solve with the possibility of receiving industry data while practitioners get access to unbiased consultation at a very low cost. Attendance at the workshop also gives practitioners the luxury of time and space, away from their normal working environment, to reflect on longer-term strategic planning and share and exchange their ideas in a stimulating environment, with effective and informed academic teams. As industry and academy are at very different timelines, industry tend to want a quick solution while the academic publication process is slow, the risk of revealing proprietary information is low. At the same time, if an earlier reporting cycle can be built into the process, then academic-practitioner workshops can successfully accelerate the ideas/solution phase, providing a two-phased output process, capable of delivering the competing dual desirable outcomes of rigour and relevance (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017) . discussion with the practitioner representatives before the workshop, eight themes emerged, appropriate academic chairpersons were then identified and invited to lead the eight themes and help groups of invited academics to work on the eight areas. These chairpersons held online meetings with representatives from each of the companies involved to better understand the issues the companies faced. The event was widely promoted through relevant networks and academics applied to join the eight groups. The chairpersons and organizing committee allocated places to the strongest and most suitable applicants for each topic. The organizations involved welcomed the mix of established and early career academics because they felt that it would lead to more creative and innovative outcomes.
On the morning of June 18 th , representatives from the five companies involved attended and made presentations to all academic attendees outlining the issues they faced.
Short Q&A sessions followed these presentations. The academics then met with the company representatives in their academic teams and subsequently developed research plans over the afternoon of the first day and the morning of the second workshop day. Professor Steve Baron, Professor Emeritus from the University of Liverpool, visited each of the research teams during this process and then chaired the final plan presentations (to the company representatives and the other academic teams) on the afternoon of the second day. The practitioners valued the event and presentations, highlighting that they lack the time to read multiple studies and valued the opportunity to be introduced to key research. They appreciated having space and time to reflect and think more strategically about the issues they faced. The teams then dispersed, with a plan to continue working remotely on their research and aiming to submit papers to a potential Special Issue of the Journal of Business Research.
The first workshop output was a short research problem proposal document, interpreting and setting out the key issues, most relevant literature and planned research approach, produced within three weeks of the workshop. Thus, the first output phase of the workshop involved a practitioner report which was compiled and shared with the practitioners incorporating the presentation slides and research proposals. Subsequently, after a longer work cycle, full academic papers were developed. Following a thorough review process, consisting of several review rounds, all eight papers were finally accepted for publication as the second output phase of the workshop.
The theme of the second workshop evolved via iterative discussion between the first author and the practitioner organizations and was finalized, based on their current challenges, as "Design and Decision Making for Customer Experience". Customer experience (CE) is an important topic for academics and practitioners alike. Increasingly, organisations strive to remain or become more competitive, differentiate themselves by delivering exceptional customer service and delight, and endeavour to build emotional relationships with customers leading to engagement and advocacy. Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) introduced the term CE into the (consumer) marketing domain in the early 80s (although the roots can be traced back to the 60s or even 50s), the concept gained in popularity in the late 90s due to Gilmore's (1998, 1999) influential HBR article and book on the experience economy. Service researchers have also had a long on-going interest in CE, with it being identified early on as a prominent area for service research activity (Fisk, Brown, & Bitner 1993) .
In 2014, Marketing Science Institute's (MSI) 70+ member companies considered customer experience so important that they selected it as the highest research priority for 2014-2016 ("Understanding Customers and the Customer Experience"). This in turn sparked a renewed research interest among the academic community, resulting in publications in leading journals (e.g., Lemon & Verhoef, 2016) . CE has been defined as a "multidimensional construct focusing on a customer's cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial, and social responses to a firm's offerings during the customer's entire purchase journey" (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016, 71) . The idea of a customer journey is important as it shows the dynamic character of CE. A customer journey can be seen as a series of service encounters and each encounter or touchpoint needs to be properly managed as they all have consequences for customer satisfaction and loyalty and willingness to continue the relationship with a company (Bitner, 1990; Bitner, Booms, & Tetreault, 1990) . What we see now with the renewed interesting in CE is that the concept in itself is multifaceted and goes beyond attitudes, with large parts of the customer journey taking place at touchpoints that are outside an organization's control. Added to that are the technological advancements that enable companies to follow the customer journeys both off-line and on-line, but also to capture new metrics such as attitudes as expressed through facial expressions.
Our Special Issue is advancing the current understanding of CE by presenting articles that discuss the role of technology (AI and big data) in CE research, atypical CE (vulnerability, deviance behaviours and service failure and recovery) and that focus on important organizational and B2B issues (business model innovation, and CEM in business markets), which are still rather neglected in CE research (Kranzbuehler et al., 2018) . Further, as CE is still a relatively new topic, the number of empirical studies is rather limited (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016 
The sequence of the papers follows the three themes outlined above: role of technology, atypical CE and organizational and B2B issues. (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016) . This is even more the case for companies that depend on a wide network of suppliers to provide their service to end users. Further, Kranzbuehler et al. (2018) suggest that more research is needed on the impact of the services of other firms on the focal company's CE.
Following that observation, Story et al. suggest that there are actors in service ecosystems who have a critical role in delivering service experiences but who are not necessarily visible to end users. However, certain circumstances, for example experienced service failures during CE journeys, may make it necessary for these support actors to become visible.
Surprisingly, only limited research has been conducted on ways in which actors in service ecosystems manage their synchronization with other actors in the system and also their visibility. The study focuses on the strategies that actors can use to manage the experiences of end users in complex service ecosystems. Using case vignettes from secondary data, the authors present six strategies and they reveal how these strategies impact the CE during normal and atypical (i.e., service failure and recovery) customer (service) journeys.
The sixth paper entitled "Discount venture brands: self-congruity and perceived value-for-money?" is authored by Thomas L. Baker, Simos Chari, Ahmad Daryanto, Julija Dzenkovska, Kemefasu Ifie, Bryan Lukas and Gianfranco Walsh. Big grocery retailers are under increasing threat by deep-discounters. In the UK alone, the big 4 grocers (Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda and Morrsions) have a combined market share of more than 70%, but are expected to lose £1.9bn worth of market share over the next five years as discounters will continue to grow (Nazir, 2020) . Big grocers are therefore under increasing pressure to find new ways of improving their customer's shopping experience in general and to lure them away from the deep-discounters in particular. Tesco, which is the largest grocer in the UK (Wunsch, 2020) , recently introduced so-called discount venture brands (DVBs). DVBs are a specific type of budget private labels, which are characterised by the following elements: a complete absence of brand owner elements, a deep-discount price that allows them to compete with competitors' budget price points, and a more upmarket look compared to conventional budget brands. The aim of their empirical study is to examine whether retail customers perceive DVBs to offer them greater value-for-money than conventional budget brands and whether customers also perceive the retailer brand to offer them greater value-formoney. Drawing on the concept of self-congruity, the authors use an experimental research design that involved 505 participants. The results show that DVBs are likely to be less effective drivers of value-for-money perceptions of retailer and product brands than conventional budget brands. Retailers should therefore use caution when they launch DVBs to complement or even replace their conventional budget brands.
"Characterizing customer experience management in business markets" is the title of the seventh paper. with an easy-to-follow, three-step framework that they can use to identify and act on opportunities to improve their company's competitive situation through better CE.
Academic-practitioner workshops offer an opportunity for value co-creation between practitioners and academics from differing research domains. The 2 nd Academic-Practitioner
Research with Impact Workshop was successful due to implementation of key learning from the 1 st workshop and the engagement and commitment of all actors involved. Key processes involved (i) pre-planning a long way in advance (comparable to an academic conference), (ii) iterative, ongoing managed discussion and co-ordination with practitioners to co-develop the workshop themes, to ensure that the focus provided value for them, (iii) securing a potential special issue from a widely respected, service relevant, journal with a wide subject remit, that values both inter-disciplinary and relevant research, highly. This latter commitment then ensured full engagement from (iv) a team of committed academic leads, willing to engage in project scoping with practitioners before the event, and to play a key role in driving the research development at the workshop and after the event. Representatives from all five companies attended the first day of the workshop. Practitioners from three of the five companies were able to attend the full two-day workshop (practitioner attendance was only required for the first day) and all three stated, unprompted, that they wanted their organisation to be invited, as soon as the date of the next workshop is confirmed. Subsequent implications of the workshop for practitioners confirmed via follow-up impact interview, included: the value of the unique opportunity to engage with academics and reframe problems from a new perspective; benefits of adoption of fresh approaches for reviewing problems; the generation of thought provoking ideas; and value of collaborative working. A key action for one was a review of their definition of 'vulnerable' customers to make it more encompassing to include temporally dependent vulnerability (e.g. lost, upset, ill customers), an outcome that may have helped this organisation to prepare for the impact of Covid-19 on their customer base.
Key learnings for future events include that we need to consider how to help the practitioners prepare for collaborative working, perhaps giving them more direction in terms of how to get the best out of the day and suggesting pre-work before they attend. Secondly, whilst there was a degree of inter-disciplinary make-up demonstrated in the academic teams, there was clearly greater scope for involvement of academics from a wider set of research domains. As the scope of service research widens still further (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017) , this becomes ever more important and we will need to work harder to look beyond traditional networks to seek future attendees, whilst at the same time balancing a need for customer experience expertise based in traditional services literature. Finally, the balance between relevance and rigour is always difficult to achieve (Gustafsson & Bowen, 2017) . The temporally limited nature of practitioner workshop events tends to result in greater numbers of theoretical contributions than empirical works and they tip the balance slightly in favour of relevance, although the involvement of relatively large academic teams helped to also deliver rigour in a timely fashion. Perhaps via future events it may become possible to deliver longitudinal empirical studies that can also deliver greater rigour in conjunction with great relevance.
This resulting Special Issue advances current understanding of CE by including articles on technology (AI and big data), atypical CE (vulnerability, deviance behaviours and service failure and recovery) and under researched important organizational and B2B issues (business model innovation, and CEM in business markets). Further work is required in all these areas of CE, particularly in AI, big data, transformative service research in relation to the experience of vulnerable customers, B2B and business model innovation as technology continues to evolve rapidly and the increasingly virtual, post Covid-19 markets and organisations take shape. We call for more academic-practitioner workshops to ensure that this work is impactful and capable of co-creating real value with practitioners.
The "2 nd Academic-Practitioner Research with Impact Workshop" could not have happened without extensive teamwork. Jamie Burton and Thorsten Gruber would like to thank Professor Anders Gustafsson for inviting the workshop output papers for consideration for publication in the Journal of Business Research. We thank Steve Baron, Professor Emeritus from the University of Liverpool, for engaging with the research teams during the event and chairing the final presentations. We thank the practitioner organizations that committed time and resources to make the workshop work and all the lead authors for their work prior to, during and after the workshop. Thank-you also to Dawn Holmes for editing the practitioner report and for follow-up impact interviews, to Victoria Mansfield for excellent co-ordination and event planning and Lilliane Abboud and Karim Sidaoui for support at the workshop and of course, all the academic teams who took part. 