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The purpose of this paper is to advance spatial studies of change interventions by conceptualizing them as liminal spaces and examining how these spaces are conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

The paper explores change interventions as liminal spaces in the empirical context of LEGO serious play workshops through participant observations and interviews.

The study shows that in change interventions an abstract, conceived liminal space is created, maintained and closed down to enable the planned change to take place. While practicing the space, the change participants may indeed perceive this space as liminal, but the space is less manageable because of their both prescribed and unprescribed interpretations. Furthermore, as subjectively experienced, the space may hold a spectrum of liminal, liminoid and everyday (business as usual) notions.

The study contributes to the research on (1) the spatiality of change interventions and (2) artificially created liminal spaces of organizing.

The paper reminds consultants and organizations embarking on change interventions to pay attention to the spatiality of such interventions. The study shows that it is not enough to plan how these spaces are to be used, but also it is equally important to consider how the participants use and experience them.

The study provides a novel insight into change interventions by examining them as liminal spaces that are simultaneously conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.

This conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.

Through the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

The military of today depends on the availability and readiness of high-technology weapon systems. As the military often has to focus on core tasks (the usage of systems), logistics and support tasks are outsourced to industry, which means that industrial suppliers gain importance for making weapon systems available and mission ready. However, companies are profit-maximizing and invest their best resources in the most promising business areas, which might be clients other than the (domestic) military customer. This raises the question of how the military can ensure that the defense industry provides the best performance: preferential treatment for the military. The purpose of this study is to investigate preferential treatment in the specific context of defense.

This paper reports on the examination of factors influencing preferential treatment for the military. The analysis uses structural equation modeling and data from a sample of German defense suppliers.

The results show that the perceived customer attractiveness has a strong effect on preferential customer treatment. Attractiveness is influenced by trust, commitment and a comparison with other customers.

There are several implications for defense theory and practice, including the need for further consideration of relational in contrast to transactional practices in military–industrial supply collaboration, as these seem highly relevant for getting the best resources for producing and maintaining weapon systems. In addition, increasing customer attractiveness, in particular if the military lacks a domestic defense industry base, is proposed.

The findings are based on a focus sample of only defense suppliers. This paper transfers the industrial discussion about the buyer–supplier relationships and preferential customer treatment to the defense logistics research context.