A bibliometric review of service ecosystems research: current status and future directions

Abstract

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.

Impact of Covid19 on the development of digital service capability for value co-creation: a mediating role of service ecosystem self-adjustment

“…(2020). Service ecosystem self-adjustment measures were five; one adapted from Lusch and Vargo (2014), one from Roundy, Bradshaw, and Brockman (2018), two items from Gölgeci, Ali, Ritala, and Arslan (2021), and one item from Vargo, Wieland, and Akaka (2016). Development of digital service capability measures were five, four from Guo, Yang, Huang, and Guo (2020) and one from Saputra et al.…”

Exploring the food value chain using open innovation: a bibliometric review of the literature

“…As Figure 1 shows, the initial keyword search identified 182 documents; after an inclusion criterion – selected documents that were published in English and peer reviewed – 162 documents remained. Peer review serves as a valuable exclusion criterion, as documents reviewed by scholars are considered high quality and contain more reliable findings than non-peer-reviewed documents (Gölgeci et al , 2021; Secinaro and Calandra, 2020; Tang and Musa, 2011). To further ensure the relevance of the documents, the researchers read the titles and abstracts of the 162 documents and excluded 78 that did not primarily examine OI in a food industry-related discipline.…”

“…The keyword search was conducted using the Scopus database. Scopus has been demonstrated to be a comprehensive and widely accepted database consisting of most of the journals indexed by Web of Science and Google Scholar (Gölgeci et al , 2021; Harzing and Alakangas, 2016; Martín-Martín et al. , 2018; Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016).…”

Making a Building Smart with a Co-Created and Continuously Evolving Enjoyable Service Entity—Insights from a Collaborative Study

“…Service ecosystems are defined as complex, relatively self-adjusting systems of resource-integrating actors that are connected by shared institutional logic and provide mutual value creation through service exchange [43,44]. Referring to the seminal works of Vargo et al [45], Vargo and Lusch [44], Akaka et al [46] and Lusch et al [47], Gölgeci et al [48] summarize in their recent review the distinguishing characteristics of the service ecosystem approach: "the role of users as crucial actors of value co-creation"; "a unique focus on customer value creation and the co-evolving system of interdependent actors and their actions"; and capability of the service ecosystem to "create value for all actors by appropriate resource integration" (p. 1-2) The service ecosystem of a smart building can thus include the different occupants, their networks and even service providers of broader city if and when they can bring value through better integration of different resources. The role of experience is essential here since actors are "cocreating value through holistic, meaning-laden experiences" [44] (p. 7), and value is "uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary" [44] (p. 8).…”