Zooming Out and Zooming In: Service Ecosystems as Venues for Collaborative Innovation

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide a perspective that extends the process of innovation beyond firm activities and new product development. We apply an S-D logic, service ecosystems framework to reframe the context of innovation to include collaboration and social structures (i.e., institutions and institutional arrangements) that guide and are guided by the actions and interactions among multiple actors. Using this framework, we show that market innovation does not automatically occur when actors (e.g., firms) or groups of actors (e.g., innovation networks) introduce new ideas or products, but instead when new practices become institutionalized as solutions. Institutionalization, in this context, is a nonlinear process in which systemic actors engage in institutional work and cocreate institutions through multiple iterations of institutional developments until common templates emerge that reflect imperfectly shared conceptions of problems and solutions. More specifically, we argue that technological innovation can be viewed as the cocreation of new value propositions. Market innovation, on the other hand, is driven by and drives the development of new technologies but also requires the acceptance of value propositions as well as the continued exchange, interpretation, integration, and application of a particular technology among multiple actors, over time (i.e., institutionalization).