Hyper-Networking of Customers, Providers, and Resources Drives New Service Business Designs: e-Commerce and Beyond

Abstract

What drives new service business designs? More precisely, what could be a generic strategy to grow value cocreation among persons? The emerging network science and service science may offer an answer: comprehensively connecting, or hyper-networking, the customers, providers, and resources via digital means. This connectionist perspective has led to the Digital Connections Scaling (DCS) theory, which suggests that new service business designs arise from thrusting the connections up to span the population, deepening down to facilitate individual persons' life cycle needs, and cutting across business designs and domains to transform them. This paper develops the DCS theory into a generic strategy for designing new service businesses and justifies the strategy with empirical evidence taken from the field of e-commerce and social networking. The study then applies the proposed strategy to analyze what new models and paradigms may come next. An information systems design framework for implementing the strategy is also proposed. [Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]