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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).

This paper aims to focus on how the use of new technologies disrupts markets. To date, marketing literature has lacked studies investigating the link between market practices and new technologies. The study adopts the blockchain technology (BcT) context to elicit novel technology-enhanced market practices.

The authors adopt a qualitative multimethod research design to engage in interpretative theorizing. They investigated 77 companies and used the Gioia method for the data coding and analysis.

The study of the adoption of blockchain prompts three technology-enhanced market practices. The latter offers new ways of resourcing by removing constraints and expanding actors’ network and knowledge to integrate resources; sensemaking by expressing new language and assigning novel meaning to represent markets; and legitimizing, by structuring new rules and trusting new mechanisms to institutionalize markets.

The technology-enhanced market practices are distinct from extant market practices as well as related, thus, enriching and complementing them. Therefore, this work expands the understanding of the mechanisms of how markets work.

This study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to focus on how BcT features affect market practices. BcT market practices entail how actors perform, share and interpret symbols and objects and set rules for how markets should work.