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To co-create value through dynamic collaborations, enterprises and their suppliers need to orchestrate the integration of complementary resources when providing business services. As such enterprises' strategic decision to apply a plural sourcing strategy to establish dynamic collaborations with their suppliers implies that both in-house and outsourced business services should be bundled into a business services portfolio. However, the antecedents that affect a business services portfolio have rarely conceptually been identified.

Drawing on resource orchestration theory, the authors theoretically developed and empirically validated a business services portfolio conceptual model. The model aims at explaining the critical antecedents to a business services portfolio based on a unique data set, comprising 121 international enterprises with variation in the degree of outsourcing, size, geographies and maturity. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to examine the relationships among the antecedents and a business services portfolio.

The findings show that the antecedent, i.e. plural sourcing strategy, modularised business processes and customer orientation have a direct and significant effect on the enterprises' business services portfolio orchestration. The results of the mediation test indicate that modularised business processes fully mediate the relationships between three independent variables with the orchestration of business services portfolio.

This study is the first to analyse the impact of plural sourcing strategy, modularised business processes and customer orientation on the business services portfolio orchestration from a plural sourcing context. Additionally, it examines the mediating role of modularised business processes in the relationship between the antecedents and business services portfolio orchestration.

This study aims to focus on a specific project marketing concept, i.e. “discontinuity,” and analyzes how this concept emerged in project marketing, becoming its key scholarly embodiment, how it became decoupled from the increasingly service-intensive project business practice and what the relevance of discontinuity is for project marketers moving forward.

This study is built on a systematic literature review of 31 years (1993–2023) of publishing data from major marketing and management journals.

This study provides three findings. First, the author reveals the risks related to marketing scholars and practitioners losing sight of each other as business practices evolve much faster than scholarly research can keep up. Second, the author highlights the role of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing conceptual innovations. Finally, the research elucidates the need for broader metatheoretical reflection to keep this research tradition on an upward trajectory.

The aim of this study is not to criticize project marketing, as many strands of business-to-business (B2B) marketing face the same challenge, but to elucidate a need for conceptual innovations, collaboration with practitioners and other disciplines and broader metatheoretical reflection to keep this research tradition on an upward trajectory.

This study makes several contributions to the project marketing research tradition. First, it reviews the emergence and dissipation of the concept of discontinuity, drawing on semantical, etymological and epistemological insights. It also reflects on recent disruptions in the marketplace and envisions future research trajectories for this elusive concept. In addition, the author develops a conceptual framework that combines project types with exchange elements in project and service businesses. This conceptual framework helps elucidate what part of the exchange is continuing and what is discontinuing in the resulting business relationships. Furthermore, the research contributes to B2B marketing more broadly by highlighting the fleeting correspondence between theory and the real world. It underscores the need for constant updates to maintain relevance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected service small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), increasing the importance of understanding how these businesses can become more resilient and how service innovation can be an effective strategy to increase their adaptive capacity and survival. This study aims to examine the role of dynamic capabilities in service innovation as a factor explaining the resilience of SMEs in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic during the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on service innovation. Additionally, the authors assess whether service innovation has a significant impact on value cocreation in these businesses.

This study used a quantitative method by surveying 118 SME owners in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The data were analyzed using partial least-squares structural equation modeling.

The results reflect important theoretical contributions by analyzing resilience from an innovation perspective instead of a retrospective approach, which is an area that has not been analyzed in the literature. Additionally, theoretical contributions to marketing services in SMEs are discussed, which is an underresearched topic. The results advance by discussing the role of service innovation through the reconfiguration of resources and how this can be an effective strategy to increase value cocreation with customers during crises.

This study is original in that it analyzes resilience from the perspective of innovation, and not from a retrospective approach. It offers a vision in response to the need for studies that provide a clearer conceptualization of resilience in small businesses. This highlights the importance of considering regional differences and service innovation as effective strategies to enhance resilience and value cocreation with customers.

Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.

This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.

Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.

This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.

The purpose of this study is to disclose ontology of DSI as a novel concept in servitization community, explore the research context and themes (i.e. technological and industrial sectors) where DSI emerges, unveil methodological complexities of the research on digital servitization and DSI and provide guidelines for future research avenues regarding DSI.

Bearing in mind the relative novelty of DSI as a concept in servitization literature, the authors adopted a systematic literature review approach to identify 111 peer-reviewed articles published in English language and available in business and management disciplines via scholar databases (Scopus). The analysis of literature discloses descriptive and thematic insights regarding digital servitization and DSI.

The study provides valuable insights from the descriptive and thematic analyses where classification of articles per publication year, citations, methodology/type of the paper, geographical location of data collection, as well as industrial sector and technological contexts are discussed. Moreover, the unique value of this study is observed through its specific focus on the characteristics of DSI-related literature.

The study is among the first of its kind to provide extensive descriptive and thematic insights on the available literature dealing with digital servitization and DSI, mapping out prior research across a wide spectrum of publication outlets and illustrating the chronological evolution of research on digital servitization and DSI.

The global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the closure of thousands of village-owned enterprises (VOEs), which are community-managed enterprises that operate in the hostile rural areas in emerging economies. Thus, considering that a Schumpeterian view of economic downturn sees recessions as times where old products/services decline while new products/services emerge, this paper aims to explore the specific innovation-based diversification strategies that matter for the survival of emerging economy VOEs in recession periods to develop new theoretical insights.

The study is based on multiple-case studies of 13 leading VOEs operating in the rural areas of Java Island in Indonesia, an emerging economy. The data was analysed using within-case and cross-case analyses.

Overall, a number of major novel findings have emerged from the analysis, based on which the authors developed several new propositions. First, from the perspectives of both new product and new service diversification, “unrelated diversification” is the primary resilience strategy that seems to be associated with the survival of VOEs in the COVID-19 recession, over and above “related diversification”. Second, from an industrial sector diversification perspective, the most dominant resilient strategy for surviving the recession is “unrelated diversification into tertiary sectors (service sector)”, over and above diversification into the primary sector (agriculture, fisheries and mining) and secondary sector (manufacturing and construction).

The authors contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship in emerging economies by identifying the resilience diversification strategies that matter for the survival of VOEs in recession.

This paper explores how financial technology (FinTech) organisations address poverty-related challenges when providing digital financial services. Employing the conceptual foundation of the liability of poorness (i.e. literacy gaps, a scarcity mindset, intense non-business pressures and a lack of financial slack), this paper explores the innovative strategies that FinTechs use to address these liabilities and promote entrepreneurship.

The paper uses detailed case data collected from three FinTech organisations operating in one South Asian country.

FinTech organisations' innovative strategies reflect a combination of “high touch” (human) vs “low touch” (digital) solutions. All the organisations simplified internal systems or procedures to accommodate customers. The degree to which the three organisations adopted each of the identified strategies shows an emerging typology of FinTechs; that is, innovators with high digital interactions, a mix of digital-human interactions and high human interactions.

The paper develops a typology which categorises FinTech innovative strategies. The typology highlights strategies pro-poor FinTechs use and explains the types of entrepreneurial support innovative organisations provide for their customers. Both the typology and the innovative strategies contribute to enhanced financial inclusion and entrepreneurial promotion amongst the poor.

The originality of the paper comes from its focus on FinTechs' innovative pro-poor strategies. Existing studies typically address the technology-side of innovations. In contrast, this paper combines innovative strategies with the liability of poorness to identify issues associated with financial inclusion.

This paper addresses the growing fragmentation between traditional and digital service innovation (DSI) research and offers a unifying metatheoretical framework.

Grounded in service-dominant (S-D) logic's service ecosystems perspective, this study builds on an institutional and systemic, rather than product-centric and linear, conceptualization of value creation to offer a unifying framework for (digital) service innovation that applies to both physical and digital service provisions.

This paper questions the commonly perpetuated idea that DSI fundamentally changes the nature of innovation. Instead, it highlights resource liquification—the decoupling of information from the technologies that store, transmit, or process this information—as a distinguishing characteristic of DSI. Liquification, however, does not affect the relational and institutional nature of service innovation, which is always characterized by (1) the emergence of novel outcomes, (2) distributed governance and (3) symbiotic design. Instead, liquification makes these three characteristics more salient.

In presenting a cohesive service innovation framework, this study underscores that all innovation processes are rooted in combinatorial evolution. Here, service-providing actors (re)combine technologies (or more generally, institutions) to adapt their value cocreation practices. This research demonstrates that such (re)combinations exhibit emergence, distributed governance and symbiotic design. While these characteristics may initially seem novel and unique to DSI, it reveals that their fundamental mechanisms are not limited to digital service ecosystems. They are, in fact, integral to service innovation across virtual, physical and blended contexts. The study highlights the importance of exercising caution in assuming that the emergence of novel technologies, including digital technologies, necessitates a concurrent rethinking of the fundamental processes of service innovation.

This study aims to develop theory on the process toward digital service innovation (DSI) and to generate insights into how companies deal with the rising complexity associated with DSI, both inside and outside of the organization, through organizational learning and alignment.

After purposeful sampling, in-depth, longitudinal case studies of three manufacturers are presented as illustration. Per case, multiple semi-structured interviews are conducted, and insights are validated through rich additional data gathering. Each company's DSI pathway is reconstructed with critical incident technique. Next, using systematic combining, a middle-range theory is developed by proposing a theoretical frame concerning the relations between DSI maturity, learning and alignment.

The authors posit that, as companies gradually develop and progress toward DSI maturity, they deal with a rising degree of complexity, fueling their learning needs. Companies that are apt to learn, pass through multiple cycles of learning and alignment to overcome specific complexities associated with different DSI stages, with each cycle unlocking new DSI opportunities and challenges.

The study applies a stage-based view on DSI combined with complexity management and organizational learning and alignment theory. It offers a theoretical frame and propositions to be used by researchers for future DSI studies and by managers to evaluate alternative DSI strategies and implementation steps.

Firms are driven to ride on the digital wave in today’s open innovation ecosystem. This study aims to explore the effect of digital transformation (DT) on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms’ innovation ambidexterity, namely, radical versus incremental innovation, respectively. Meanwhile, the authors evaluated the moderating role of the complexity of R&D collaboration portfolio (i.e. organizational diversity and geographic diversity) in the above relationships.

Using a panel data set of 171 Chinese listed firms in the information and communications technology services industry from 2010 to 2018, the proposed hypotheses were empirically attested.

It is found that DT has a positive relationship with radical innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship with incremental innovation. In terms of the R&D collaboration portfolio, organizational diversity positively moderates the relationships between DT and innovation ambidexterity, respectively. The geographic diversity weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of DT on incremental innovation; however, its moderating role in the link between DT and radical innovation is not empirically verified.

Extant scholars mainly addressed the interplay between KIBS firms and their manufacturing clients, while this study reveals the different consequences of DT on KIBS firms’ innovation ambidexterity to highlight the role of KIBS firms is an independent and essential innovator in a knowledge-driven economy. Notably, the findings contribute to knowledge management (KM) and R&D literature by confirming the diversity of the R&D collaboration portfolio is a critical KM strategy for KIBS firms to develop and promote external knowledge resources.