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Managing ecosystems for service innovation: A dynamic capability view

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Lütjen, H 
Tietze, F 
Urmetzer, F 

Abstract

The success of service innovations is intertwined with firms’ capabilities to coordinate, orchestrate, and collaborate with a set of external actors. Adopting an ecosystem and dynamic capability perspective, this article examines ecosystem-related capabilities for developing service innovation in product-centric firms. The research uses a mixed-methods approach focusing on the energy utility sector: (1) a survey with 133 managers from 28 firms that allows a comparison of ecosystem-related capabilities between firms with high and low service-innovation intensity; and (2) a complementary interview study with 8 of these firms that have high service-innovation intensity, allowing a detailed understanding of the relevant ecosystem-related capabilities to be developed. From the data we derive a set of 12 ecosystem-related capabilities for service innovation related to the sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring of external resources. The results indicate that firms with high service-innovation intensity possess significantly stronger ecosystem-related capabilities than firms with lower service-innovation intensity. Those firms also seem to sense and seize external opportunities and resources to a greater extent in order to reconfigure their service-related ecosystems. The findings also show that successful service innovators consider not only value-adding partnerships, such as suppliers and customers, to be relevant for service innovation, but also relationships with non-direct value-adding ecosystem stakeholders (e.g., local governments, communities, legislators).

Description

Keywords

Service innovation, Dynamic capability, Ecosystem, Open innovation, Servitization, Energy utilities

Journal Title

Journal of Business Research

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0148-2963
1873-7978

Volume Title

104

Publisher

Elsevier BV