How to scale up contact-intensive services: ICT-enabled service innovation

Abstract

Purpose While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contact-intensive services (CIS) – such as education, healthcare and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of CIS – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling CIS to support ICT-enabled service innovation. Design/methodology/approach The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three CIS to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling. Findings The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic. Research limitations/implications While the findings reveal that the scalability of CIS is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in CIS. Practical implications The insights into the practices enable service providers of CIS to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service. Originality/value This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of CIS as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.

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

“…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).…”

Requirements for an IT Support System based on Hybrid Intelligence

“…In conclusion ISSHI systems are service systems that integrate different resources [29,30], which calls for the design of future work systems [31] and opens new avenues for modeling such complex resource relationships [32,33].…”

Can you help me scale? A Systematic Analysis of Scaling Capabilities of Conversational Agents for Digital Services

“…X X X Hein et al [53] X X X Hein et al [54] X X X Hinz/Bernhardt [55] X X Jewell et al [56] X X X Jin Zhang et al [23] X X X Huang/Rust [57] X X Huang/Henfridsson [40] X X X Kastalli/Van Looy [5] X X X X Kern et al [58] X X Kleinschmidt et al [10] X X X Kuula et al [59] X X Labes et al [60] X X X Lacity/Reynolds [61] X X Lewis et al [42] X X X Lusch/Nambisan [62] X X X Mohan et al [63] X X Peters et al [64] X X Raja et al [65] X X X Scheuerle/Schmitz [66] X X X Sjödin et al [67] X X Sjödin et al [68] X X X Täuscher/Abdelkafi [39] X X X Turetken et al [69] X X X Vorisek [70] X X X Wang et al [ Here we find that the majority of research is focused on a total of four major application domains. First, business and finance (BizFin), where we define business as retail, sales, marketing and related topics in a more traditional sense and finance as any financial service including but not exclusive to transaction, banking, credit or payment services.…”

“…Technology Speed and Timing Novelty/Uniqueness Ahmad/Andras [45] X Arantes [46] X X Barret et al [47] X Barros et al [48] X Yes Bharadwaj et al [49] X X X Böhmann et al [50] X X Yes Böhmann et al [28] X X Di Pietro et al [41] X Engelhardt et al [51] X Gupta/Basu [52] X X Hein et al [53] X X X Hein et al [54] X X Hinz/Bernhardt [55] X Jewell et al [56] X X Jin Zhang et al [23] X X X Huang/Rust [57] X X X Huang/Henfridsson [40] X X X Kastalli/Van Looy [5] X X X Kern et al [58] X X Kleinschmidt et al [10] X Kuula et al [59] X X X Labes et al [60] X X Lacity/Reynolds [61] X X X Lewis et al [42] X X Lusch/Nambisan [62] X Mohan et al [63] X X X X Peters et al [64] X X Raja et al [65] X X Scheuerle/Schmitz [66] X Sjödin et al [67] X X X X Sjödin et al [68] X X X Täuscher/Abdelkafi [39] X X X Turetken et al […”

“…This characteristic marks a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are limitations and challenges that service providers must face but on the other hand, if dealt with properly, there is a significant potential to scale up the service business [10].…”