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This article aims to provide greater clarity regarding the conceptualization and critical role of digital marketing ecosystems for the global expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and offer novel research directions to prompt future research.

The authors first review the marketing literature related to marketing ecosystems, highlighting the evolution of this body of work across a range of domains such as services, innovation and new product development, communications and marketing strategy more broadly. Next, two case examples of MNEs whose global expansion efforts have been supported by their marketing ecosystems are used to highlight the role of marketing ecosystems in global market expansion. Finally, novel research directions are offered to prompt future research and provide greater insight into this emerging area.

The case examples we examine yield important insights into the role of marketing ecosystems for MNEs expanding from emerging markets (EMs) to developed markets (DMs). EM-MNEs such as TEMU face more communication and payment ecosystem challenges while opening their supply chain to DMs. Contrary to EM-MNEs, DM-MNEs face institutional and sociocultural challenges that require different marketing ecosystem orchestration approaches.

Marketing ecosystems can provide MNEs with greater multinational flexibility, enabling them to adapt their global strategies to navigate increasing complexities in global markets, such as trends toward increased protectionism and geopolitical disruptions. However, there is surprisingly little research addressing this issue.

Purpose – The paper develops a conceptual framework for assessing value-creating service ecosystems that contains four core dimensions: medium, meaning, usage, and network. Its purpose is to identify and discuss the implications of the changes that occur in these dimensions when exchanges within the ecosystem that have long been mediated by physical products become direct instead.

Methodology/approach – The analysis employs the historical method and is based on a systematic investigation of the evolution of the recorded-music market during the past 150 years.

Findings – The analysis shows that the key dimensions of the recorded-music-service ecosystem evolved only gradually and incrementally during the era of physical formats that were dominant until the mid-1990s. With the advent of “liquid” music, the elements of the service ecosystem changed dramatically, leading to instability and redefining roles and exchange mechanisms in the ecosystem.

Research limitations/implications – The investigation focuses on a single ecosystem (music), and conclusions stemming from it are subject to the assumptions inherent in the historical method. Nevertheless, the paper contributes to knowledge in the Service-Dominant Logic (S-D logic) domain by offering a robust framework and a set of core dimensions that are useful for systematically analyzing the nature and consequences of changes that occur in rapidly evolving service ecosystems.

Practical implications – Apart from direct implications for the music market, the proposed framework can help managers working in other ecosystems to adopt a macro perspective in addressing value-creation issues and to pay particular attention to the underlying dynamics that influence value creation in those ecosystems.

Originality/value of paper – The development of a conceptual framework that adopts a macro-level, market-wide perspective for understanding value creation in service ecosystems is a distinct contribution of the paper, as is the application of the historical method in analyzing such an ecosystem.

Purpose – The purpose of this essay is to explore further the concept of value cocreation from a service-ecosystems view, by considering the importance of networks and the configuration of relationships and resources in markets.

Methodology/approach – We use a conceptual approach to extend a service-dominant (S-D) logic, ecosystems view of value cocreation by drawing on the literature regarding networks in marketing and related research.

Findings – A service-ecosystems approach to cocreating value-in-context is proposed, which points toward networks as mediating factors in value cocreation because they influence the ability to access, adapt, and integrate resources by establishing exchange relationships and shaping the social contexts through which value is experienced.

Research implications – This research suggests that value cocreation is a complex and multidimensional process that is best studied in the context of dynamic networks or ecosystems of service exchange.

Practical implications – This research suggests that networks mediate value cocreation, and thus, firms should consider the configurations of relationships and resources to develop more compelling value propositions.

Social implications – This research draws on the idea that exchange relationships are embedded within society and suggests that processes of value cocreation not only draw on but also contribute to the social contexts that frame market exchange.

Originality/value of essay – This research extends the value cocreation and S-D logic literature by exploring the role of networks in service ecosystems. In this framework, networks are mediators of value cocreation because they enable access to resources and help to (re)shape social contexts through which value is derived.

This study aims to investigate the impact of an institutionalized market context on platform ecosystem development. It studies how platform ecosystems are set up and evolve in the asset management industry and explores the role of the platform leader and selected core network partners in unleashing value innovation notwithstanding institutional barriers. A problematization lens is used to identify deviations between the management practices in this industry setting and the prescriptions and suggested practices in the extant literature on platform ecosystem development.

The research follows a retrospective longitudinal single-case design focusing on the development of a new platform ecosystem to which several PaaS initiatives are linked. It is based on 13 in-depth interviews over a one-year period triangulated with documentation and member checks. This study identifies the impact of regulations and norms on the early stages of platform ecosystem development.

In this institutionalized market, intensified interactions between carefully selected strategic market players focusing on platform development, lead to growing value innovation initiatives. The collaboration between core actors evolves “under the radar” with select partners and with lots of controls by incumbents. The value innovation process evolves in a non-disruptive way. Initially, the new value initiatives are rather incremental and focus on optimizing the present business models while slowly adding new peripheral services shared as successful signs of value innovation initiatives. This “submerged” direction enables platform actors to gather critical mass and stimulates co-evolution with key players.

This paper outlines one vertical and looks at various principles involved during early stages of platform development. Because the authors have chosen a deep dive into one institutionalized setting, future studies could investigate a broader scope of institutionalized settings/verticals and a broader scope of management stages and related practices to replicate the study and corroborate the findings. The idea raised from hybrid platform ecosystem development also warrants further study.

Practitioners in institutionalized business-to-business markets find suggestions on how to overcome institutional barriers to platform ecosystem development and this study shows which levers can be used by core actors of ecosystems to strengthen established business models and simultaneously unleash value innovation initiatives.

This study contributes to the understanding of the challenges to be faced when setting up and expanding platform ecosystems in a highly institutionalized setting and identifies “levers” to create a smooth flow and snowball effect for platform ecosystem development. It “fine-tunes” the extant literature on platform ecosystem development to institutionalized markets.

Recent research demonstrates how firms strive to shape their business environment and level the playing field in their favor. To explain this phenomenon, business scholars use competing notions: markets, business networks and service ecosystems. The purpose of this paper is to identify and address a potential problem, in that these notions overlap to a considerable extent, as scholars tend to draw from and contribute to academic silos.

The authors approach the issue of potential overlaps in the current literature on markets, business networks and service ecosystems through a literature review of each of these three concepts, with special attention to both their overlaps and differences.

The authors’ review of the extant literature allows the authors to concur with Ballantyne et al. (2011) that contemporary service research shows a tendency to create, adopt and overuse labels. This situation has given rise to what the authors term “academic silos” in which even closely related research stream tend to become isolated, and the authors posit that a more holistic view would be beneficial.

The authors offer two main contributions to the existing literature. The first contribution is mainly theoretical, aimed at business research, and consists of providing a review and understanding of the partly competing, partly complimentary concepts of markets, business networks and service ecosystems, in which the authors’ further address service ecosystems based on both a service-dominant logic and a service logic understanding. The second contribution is more managerial, arguing for the need of the successful business research to consider the desired end result of contributing to successful business practices.

This study aims to address the following research questions: (1) What are the theoretical frameworks and areas of study that influence the development of service ecosystems? and (2) To what extent does a service ecosystem align with the theoretical concepts presented in other research contexts within the study areas, thereby transforming the fundamental structure of the core concept?

We conducted a bibliometric systematic literature review, analyzing 280 papers from a sample of 52 journals listed in the Association of Business Schools (ABS). The review covered the period between 2004 and 2022, and we utilized co-citation analysis, multi-dimensional scaling analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) on a total of 2,614 citations.

This study employs co-citation analysis to identify the conceptual structure of the service ecosystem based on highly cited papers. Additionally, we utilize multidimensional scaling (MDS) to uncover key approaches driving service ecosystem research. Through HCA and network analysis, we examine the research scope and its development, emphasizing theory-driven approaches. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, we explore the interrelationships between scope, domain and evolution. This comprehensive analysis allows us to delve deeply into the study of service ecosystems. To broaden the research scope, we propose a conceptual framework for comparing the main components of a service ecosystem. The current paper clarifies the service ecosystem's intellectual structure, including service performance, humanistic approach, sustainable innovations and service reflexivity and reformation and proposes a prospective research framework for specialists and researchers by introducing a metaverse service ecosystem.

For the first time, the findings of this study shed light on processes that facilitate the flow of technologies, business models and markets through social structures, ultimately contributing to social change. In service-based systems, the development and application of a more humanistic approach within and surrounding social service ecosystems are crucial as they evolve. Therefore, adopting a dynamic and multifaceted approach offers valuable insights into the drivers of value creation.

The purpose of this study is to delineate the differences in how contextual factors (i.e. funding, market reach and talent) influence performance of entrepreneurial ecosystems in advanced and emerging economies.

Building upon the biological perspective on entrepreneurial ecosystems, in this study we conduct the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on the sample of 100 entrepreneurial ecosystems across 25 advanced economies and 21 emerging economies. The fsQCA allows us to embrace the causal complexity that characterizes the relationship between multiple contextual factors and ecosystem performance in countries with different levels of economic development.

The results elucidate how the level of a country’s economic development influences the interplay of contextual factors and their collective impact on the performance of entrepreneurial ecosystems across advanced and emerging economies.

Our findings provide useful guidance for practitioners and policymakers aiming to cultivate conducive environments for nurturing new ventures within local ecosystems, which will stimulate the economic growth of the regions and narrow the gap between advanced and emerging economies.

This study delineates the complex interactions of key contextual factors and their joint impact on ecosystem performance in emerging economies, in comparison to ecosystems in advanced economies. By looking into differences of antecedents of high and low performance of ecosystems embedded in countries with distinctive level of economic development, this study goes beyond prior research that primarily focused on singular countries or regions.

Service-dominant logic acknowledges that actors can influence how service ecosystems evolve through institutional work, but empirical research is only nascent. This paper advances understanding of ecosystem change by proposing that dynamic capabilities are a special type of operant resources enabling actors to conduct institutional work. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to explore which dynamic capabilities are associated with proactively influencing service ecosystems.

Drawing on service-dominant logic, institutional work and dynamic capabilities, this exploratory study assumes an actor-centric perspective and proposes a conceptual model with a hierarchy of dynamic capabilities as the antecedents for successfully influencing service ecosystems. The research model was tested with survey data using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

Among the dynamic capabilities studied, “visioning” and “influencing explicit institutions” directly affect “success in influencing service ecosystems,” whereas “timing” does so indirectly through “influencing explicit institutions.” The other dynamic capabilities studied have no significant effect on “success in influencing service ecosystems.” “Success in influencing service ecosystems” positively affects the “increased service ecosystem size and efficiency.”

In addition to reactively positioning and competing at the marketplace, firms can choose to proactively influence their service ecosystems’ size and efficiency. Firms aiming to influence service ecosystems should particularly develop dynamic capabilities related to visioning, timing and influencing explicit institutions.

This research is the first service-dominant logic investigation of the linkage between the actors’ dynamic capabilities and their ability to influence service ecosystems.

Service ecosystems are becoming an important domain of joint value creation and resource integration, and the literature in the field is burgeoning. The recent growth in the literature warrants consolidating the findings of the existing literature, summarizing the recent development and identifying avenues for more impactful future research on the topic. This study aims to map the service ecosystems research domain and synthesize insights by integrating qualitative content analysis with quantitative data analysis.

This paper uses algorithmic bibliometric review (quantitative) with VOSviewer and R-package and content analysis (qualitative) on 119 service ecosystems papers published between 2003 and 2020.

The bibliometric analysis uncovers the critical research domains, knowledge trajectories, influential authors and journals and author networks in the field. The content analysis identifies the four most important research themes (value creation, change triggers, strategic and entrepreneurial action and institutional embeddedness and agency) and provides an integrative view of the dynamics among these themes. The authors also find the need for more empirical and theory grounded research around these four themes. Furthermore, based on the review, the authors discuss the disciplinary identity of the service ecosystems field and suggest interesting future research opportunities, along with ideas for useful empirical approaches and theoretical extensions.

This study’s comprehensive analysis offers an overview of the evolution and identity of the service ecosystems research and identifies several promising opportunities for future research on service ecosystems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine shopper marketing through service-dominant logic and service ecosystem lenses. In doing so, the authors reveal challenges and opportunities for supply chain management.

The work is conceptual, drawing on contemporary service-dominant logic thinking.

Examination of shopper marketing reveals that it is currently stuck in goods-dominant logic and micro-level ways of thinking. By taking a macro service ecosystem view, all actors, including shoppers, are seen as resource integrators seeking resource density. The macro view highlights a significant amount of goods and information flow and variance now being added throughout shopper marketing systems.

A guiding framework with appropriate terms defined offers new research directions and new ways practitioners can approach challenges in the industry. Research programs are suggested in the areas of facilitating resource density, examining the extent of ecosystems, measurement, mapping of resources, and creating shopper marketing innovations.

This study provides an alternative way of looking at problems that arise in supply chain management planning and execution of shopper marketing initiatives.

Few scholastic articles address shopper marketing even within marketing and essentially none do so in supply chain management despite it having significantly disrupted supply chains since 2004. This article offers an overview of shopper marketing and helps supply chain managers identify quickly how they can add value and supply chain management researchers begin to address the challenges.