Search results

Open service innovation is an emergent new service development practice, where knowledge on how to organize development work is scarce. The purpose of the present research is to identify and describe relevant archetypes of open service innovation. The study views an archetype as an organizing template that includes the competence of participants, organizing co-creation among participants and ties between participants. In particular, the study’s interest lies in how open service innovation archetypes are used for incremental and radical service innovation.

For the research, a nested case study was performed, in which an industrial firm with nine open service innovation groups was identified. Forty-five interviews were conducted with participants. For each case, first a within-case analysis was performed, and how to perform open service innovation in practice was described. Then, a cross-case analysis identifying similarities and differences between the open service innovation groups was performed. On the basis of the cross-case analysis, three archetypes for open service innovation were identified.

The nested case study identified three archetypes for open service innovation: internal group development, satellite team development and rocket team development. This study shows that different archetypes are used for incremental and radical service innovation and that a firm can have multiple open service innovation groups using different archetypes.

This study provides suggestions on how firms can organize for open service innovation. The identified archetypes can guide managers to set up, develop or be part of open service innovation groups.

This paper uses open service innovation as a mid-range theory to extend existing research on new service development in networks or service ecosystems. In particular, it shows how open service innovation can be organized to develop both incremental and radical service innovations.

The aim of this paper is to understand if service innovation (Helkkula et al., 2018), based on artificial intelligence (AI) systems, may guarantee healthcare service ecosystem (H-SES) well-being (Frow et al., 2019; Beirão et al., 2017), taking into account that many doubts relieved in terms of transparency may compromise the patients' perceived quality of health services provided through AI systems.

A literature review on service innovation, detected in terms of value co-creation, and service ecosystem, investigated in terms of well-being, is drawn. To analyze the implications of service innovation on a H-SES well-being, through the technology acceptance degree and predisposition to use by actors, a case study based on TAM-model 3 determinants as categories is carried out.

AI-based service innovation archetypes in healthcare may be considered as antecedents of the service ecosystem well-being conditions as long as they enable actors to co-create value. To make it possible, a patient-driven service innovation is necessary in order to mitigate the risks of its inactivity due to fears in terms of transparency.

Service innovation and service ecosystem well-being may be studied in an integrated way, with a multidisciplinary approach, and are linked by value co-creation, because only thanks a patient-driven service innovation is possible to foster service ecosystem well-being in healthcare.

This work tries to detect the factors that can impact service innovation in the retail sector according to a service ecosystem (SES) perspective. This paper aims to understand whether it is possible to study innovation focusing on the impact of technology on resource integration practices in SESs and to rank different patterns of innovation by evaluating their effects in terms of value co-creation.

To show up the perception of actors, a case study has been carried out through semi-structured interviews. The aggregates of practices and the service innovation archetypes, drawn from the theoretical background, have been used as categories of analysis.

Service innovation is reconceptualised as the result of the application of new technology to resource integration practices in the retail SES, and it is possible to rank its patterns and outcomes by deepening its effects on the emergence of value co-creation phenomena. Shared intentions have been identified as drivers of service innovation, but greater transparency in systems used to embolden a higher willingness to use could be necessary.

Service innovation has been studied by focusing on value co-creation; for this reason, the willingness to use technology emerged as a determinant of service innovation. This result implies the need for a multilevel reinterpretation of contemporary SES, both regarding the technical features of digital solutions and their adherence to users' skills and the effects of willingness or unwillingness to use on value co-creation.

The empirical study draws on a crowdsourced database of 221 innovations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aside from the health and humanitarian crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an acute economic downturn in most sectors, forcing public and private organizations to rethink and reconfigure service provision. The paper introduces the concept of imposed service innovation as a new strategic lens to augment the extant view of service innovation as a primarily discretionary activity.

The identified imposed service innovations were assigned to 11 categories and examined in terms of their strategic horizon and strategic stretch. The innovations are characterized by spatial flexibility, social and health outreach and exploitation of technology.

As a new area of service innovation research, imposed service innovations highlight strategic issues that include the primacy of customers and the fragility of institutions.

Situations involving imposed service innovation represent opportunities for rapid business development when recognized as such. A severe disruption such as a pandemic can catalyze managerial rethinking as organizations are forced to look beyond their existing business strategies.

As a strategic response to severe disruption of institutions, markets and service offerings, imposed service innovations afford opportunities to implement transformation and enhance well-being. This novel strategic lens foregrounds a societal account of service innovation, emphasizing societal relevance and context beyond the challenges of business viability alone.

While extant service innovation research has commonly focused on discretionary activities that enable differentiation and growth, imposed service innovations represent actions for resilience and renewal.

Technological disruptions such as the Internet of Things and autonomous devices, enhanced analytical capabilities (artificial intelligence) and rich media (virtual and augmented reality) are creating smart environments that are transforming industry structures, processes and practices. The purpose of this paper is to explore critical technological advancements using a value co-creation lens to provide insights into service innovations that impact ecosystems. The paper provides examples from tourism and hospitality industries as an information dependent service management context.

The research synthesizes prevailing theories of co-creation, service ecosystems, networks and technology disruption with emerging technological developments.

Findings highlight the need for research into service innovations in the tourism and hospitality sector at both macro-market and micro-firm levels, emanating from the rapid and radical nature of technological advancements. Specifically, the paper identifies three areas of likely future disruption in service experiences that may benefit from immediate attention: extra-sensory experiences, hyper-personalized experiences and beyond-automation experiences.

Tourism and hospitality services prevail under varying levels of infrastructure, organization and cultural constraints. This paper provides an overview of potential disruptions and developments and does not delve into individual destination types and settings. This will require future work that conceptualizes and examines how stakeholders may adapt within specific contexts.

Technological disruptions impact all facets of life. A comprehensive picture of developments here provides policymakers with nuanced perspectives to better prepare for impending change.

Guest experiences in tourism and hospitality by definition take place in hostile environments that are outside the safety and familiarity of one’s own surroundings. The emergence of smart environments will redefine how customers navigate their experiences. At a conceptual level, this requires a complete rethink of how stakeholders should leverage technologies, engage and reengineer services to remain competitive. The paper illustrates how technology disrupts industry structures and stimulates value co-creation at the micro and macro-societal level.

This chapter reviews the literature on servitization to understand whether and how mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have been dealt with and what the portrayed consequences are of servitization through M&As. Servitization refers to how manufacturing firms extend and remodel their offerings to focus on value in use rather than product transfer. The rationale of the chapter follows from how business model innovation or business modeling has been predicted as the next M&A wave, while the focus on servitization has been pronounced in research and practice as a means for manufacturing firms to refocus operations during the past decade. The chapter concludes that while the servitization literature is vibrant, the mode of reaching service competence and renewing business is not well explored in the literature. In line with the predicted next M&A wave, servitization through M&As would thereby create an interesting path for future research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on value co-creation (VCC). However, a study providing a comprehensive summary of the current state of the art and common ground of the two fields is missing. The current study aims to fill this gap by conceptualizing the role of AI in VCC and customer decision-making.

The study reviews literature on VCC and AI together, including a total of 108 articles. To bring the literature together, the authors adopted the antecedents-mediators-outcomes framework and narrative approach that helped them develop a framework by integrating the antecedents, mediators and outcomes of AI-facilitated VCC. Furthermore, the authors also operationalized existing literature to facilitate an understanding of the role of AI in customer decision-making.

The study, in addition to identifying the common theoretical grounds of VCC and AI (human behavior, cognition and social interactions), operationalizes AI functionality, its characteristics and customer characteristics as the antecedents of AI-facilitated VCC. Moreover, based on literature, on the continuum of low-to-high involvement, four types of decision-making were identified as mediator of the relationship between AI characteristics, customer characteristics and VCC. Additionally, the authors found different categorizations of AI in literature as archetypes to support various forms of VCC.

The study contributes to the literature of VCC and AI by construing a comprehensive framework for analyzing AI's impact on VCC, envisioning customer–AI interaction as continual exchange of advantages in which characteristics of AI and customers play a critical role in customer decision-making and shaping VCC.

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.

Existing innovation frameworks suggest that manufacturing firms have traditionally developed a complementary model of technological innovations comprising process and product innovations (e.g. Oslo Manual). This article presents digital service innovation as a novel form of technological innovation that is capable of enhancing the performance of firms in certain manufacturing industries.

Drawing on technological innovation and digital servitization fields of research, this study argues that digital service innovation, in manufacturing contexts, complements traditional sources of technological innovation, so increasing the profit margins of firms. This effect is significant in industries characterized by business-to-business contexts, high presence of link channels and long product life spans (e.g. manufacturing and computer-based industries). Predictions are tested on a unique sample of 423 Spanish manufacturing firms using parametric (t-test) and nonparametric (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, fsQCA) approaches.

The results of this analysis show that a necessary condition so that manufacturing firms can increase profits is the deployment of simultaneous process and product innovations. It also reveals that optimal configuration requires that digital service innovation be undertaken, particularly in machinery and computer-based manufacturing industries. Hence, all three sources of technological innovation are brought together in order to reach the highest levels of company performance. The evidence suggests that technological innovation and digital servitization are closely interrelated in highly innovative manufacturing contexts.

This study's originality and value reside in the fact that it reveals the existence of firms incorporating digital service innovation – a new, technological innovation dimension that challenges existing innovation frameworks – to complement traditional technological innovation sources, namely process and product innovation. Moreover, the study conceptualizes and empirically tests the value-adding role of digital services in firms' technological innovation portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how service design practices reshape mental models to enable innovation. Mental models are actors’ assumptions and beliefs that guide their behavior and interpretation of their environment.

This paper offers a conceptual framework for innovation in service ecosystems through service design that connects the macro view of innovation as changing institutional arrangements with the micro view of innovation as reshaping actors’ mental models. Furthermore, through an 18-month ethnographic study of service design practices in the context of healthcare, how service design practices reshape mental models to enable innovation is investigated.

This research highlights that service design reshapes mental models through the practices of sensing surprise, perceiving multiples and embodying alternatives. This paper delineates the enabling conditions for these practices to occur, such as coaching, diverse participation and supportive physical materials.

This study brings forward the underappreciated role of actors’ mental models in innovation. It highlights that innovation in service ecosystems is not simply about actors making changes to their external context but also actors shifting their own assumptions and beliefs.

This paper offers insights for service managers and service designers interested in supporting innovation on how to catalyze shifts in actors’ mental models by creating the conditions for specific service design practices.

This paper is the first to shed light on the central role of actors’ mental models in innovation and identify the service design practices that reshape mental models.