A service-dominant logic perspective on the roles of technology in service innovation: uncovering four archetypes in the sharing economy

Abstract

The role and influence of information technology in firms' business and value creation remains controversial. The question of how technology can drive service innovations is especially crucial in highly competitive and rapidly developing areas such as digital platforms but not well understood. This study investigates the role of information technology in service innovation in sharing economy organizations. These organizations are digital platforms that combine physical and digital service elements. Adopting a service-dominant logic perspective, we conduct an interpretive multiple-case study to gain a deeper understanding of the types of service innovation in this area and the different roles that IT can play in these initiatives. Our findings reveal different manifestations of service innovation and thereby help to identify previously unexplored interdependencies between the service ecosystem and value co-creation. We furthermore find that organizations' choices regarding the role of IT are dependent on the level of heterogeneity and standardization of the mediated transactions. We derive four archetypes for the role of IT in service innovation that explain how and why sharing economy organizations exploit IT. We then translate our findings into practical guidelines for managers of digital platforms.

Pathways to Digital Service Innovation: The Role of Digital Transformation Strategies in Established Organizations

“…In particular, it can be used to include servicedisadvantaged communities, for example, in the context of healthcare or finance (Srivastava and Shainesh 2015;Economides and Jeziorski 2017). Depending on the specific context, there are also distinct archetypes of innovation (Frey et al 2019). While DSI provides various benefits for organizations, it also comes with serious challenges since it "requires a change in managing provider-customer relationships by adopting new and innovative co-creation approaches" (Sjödin et al 2020, p. 479).…”

“…So far, research on DSI and DT has highlighted process models for agile co-creation (Sjödin et al 2020), organizational enablers in established companies with data-rich environments (Troilo et al 2017), and design frameworks for service innovation in the context of smart product-service systems (Zheng et al 2018). Furthermore, there are articles about the importance of digital service innovation (DSI) for including service-disadvantaged communities (Srivastava and Shainesh 2015), archetypes of service innovations in the sharing economy (Frey et al 2019), and scaling contact-intensive services through the use of IT (Kleinschmidt et al 2019). Various scholars have explored the formation and execution of DT strategies as well as the emergence of new executive roles, such as the Chief Digital Officer (CDO), and their integration into the organization (Chanias et al 2019;Hanelt et al 2020;Singh et al 2019).…”

Customer engagement and relationships in multi-actor service ecosystems

“…Second, the emerging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented, virtual and mixed realities etc. are changing the way businesses manage their interactions and relationships with customers, employees, channel partners and actors involved in multi-actor service ecosystems (Frey, Trenz, & Veit, 2019). Hence, there is a clear need for more research on the implications of the infusion of these innovative technologies and how these would shape the future of multi-actor service ecosystems (Lütjen, Schultz, Tietze, & Urmetzer, 2019).…”

Process Mining for Advanced Service Analytics – From Process Efficiency to Customer Encounter and Experience

“…Previously, service provision was often described as a linear, dyadic interaction in which a supplier provides something to a customer viewed as a passive recipient [26]. Recent research rather takes a network or system perspective [27] in which value is co-created by multiple actors (i.e., individuals, collectives, or even smart technologies) that contribute to an overarching solution [20]. In these systems, the actors share their resources and access the resources provided by others [28,29,26].…”