Making service provisioning significantly more sustainable is crucial if humankind wants to make a serious effort to operate withinthe boundaries of what the planet can support. The purpose of this paper is to develop a systemic understanding of sustainability inservice provision and shed light on the mechanisms that drive unsustainability and hinder service providers in their efforts to bemore sustainable. To contextualize our study, we focus on a significant sustainability problem: food waste stemming from foodretail at the retailer-consumer interface. We make two theoretical contributions to the service research on sustainability. First, weoffer a systemic conceptualization of sustainability in service as a dynamic ability of a focal system (e.g., a servicefirm) to sustain thesystem(s) that contains it. Second, we explicate the mechanisms—stocks andflows, feedback and mindsets—that contribute to(un)sustainable service provision as a systemic behavior, and which can thus be used as intervention points when designingsustainability initiatives. Our work also has significant practical implications for food retailers and policymakers working towardsreaching UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, as we specify the feedback loops that drive food waste and hinder efforts toreduce it at the retailer-consumer interface.

While service design has been highlighted as a promising approach for driving innovation, there are often struggles in realizing lasting change in practice. The issues with long-term implementation reveal a reductionist view of service design that ignores the institutional arrangements and other interdependencies that influence design efforts within multi-actor service systems. The purpose of this article is to build a systemic understanding of service design to inform actors' efforts aimed at intentional, long-term change in service systems. To achieve this aim, we inform the conceptual building blocks of service design by applying service-dominant logic's service ecosystems perspective. Through this process, we develop four core propositions and a multilevel process model ofservice ecosystem design.The conceptualization of service ecosystem design advances service design theory by illuminating previously taken for granted aspects; explaining how intentional, long-term change emerges; and expanding the scope of service design beyond projects. Furthermore, this research offers a foundation for future research on service design that involves extending the systemic conceptualization of service design, conducting more holistic empirical investigations, and developing practical methods and approaches for the embedded, collective processes of designing.

Purpose – Service scholars are finding that institutions – enduring social structures, such as rules, norms, beliefs – are increasingly important in theorizing on service-related phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to advance the use of institutional theory in service research by synthesizing the key insights from institutional theory that have been applied to service-related phenomena and developing a research agenda to guide the future use of institutional theory in service research.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper is an integrative literature review covering 68 articles from major service research and marketing journals that adopt institutional concepts and frameworks to study service-related phenomena.

Findings – The paper maps the “institutional turn” of service research, that is, the increasing tendency to draw on institutional theory for theoretical insights within service research and builds a conceptual framework of the institutional stabilization and destabilization mechanisms that explain endurance and change in service phenomena. The paper also proposes a research agenda that outlines four previously ignored aspects of institutions that have important implications for service research.

Research limitations/implications – In addition to synthesizing insights and proposing directions for future research, the paper highlights specific theoretical and methodological considerations for the future use of institutional theory within service research. The literature review is limited to the 13 major service research and marketing journals.Originality/value – This paper is the first literature review of the use of institutional theory in service research.

Service-dominant (S-D) logic has been recognized as a theoretical foundation for developing a science of service. As the field of service science advances the understanding of value cocreation in service systems, S-D logic continues to evolve as well. Recent updates and consolidation of the foundational premises establish five core axioms of S-D logic and outline a pathway for understanding the role of institutions in value cocreation in general, and innovation in particular. This chapter overviews the evolution of S-D logic and its service ecosystems view, which can contribute to the furthering the development of service science and advancing the study of innovation in service systems. Future research directions are proposed.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of context in service innovation by developing a conceptual framework that illuminates the key elements and trends in context change.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a service ecosystem lens for understanding how elements and trends in context foster service innovation. A conceptual framework identifying the role of context change in fostering service innovation is developed and justified through illustrations across industry settings of health, retailing, banking and education.

Findings – Context change is conceptualized by three trends – speed, granularity and liquification – that provide an analytical foundation for understanding how changes in the elements of context – space, resources and institutional arrangements – can foster service innovation. The analysis indicates emerging patterns across industries that allow exploring scenarios, grounded in emerging trends and developments in service innovation toward 2050.

Practical implications – Managers are offered a framework to guide service innovation and help them prepare for the future. The paper also suggests areas for further research.

Originality/value – The paper contributes with a new conceptualization of context change to identify and explain service innovation opportunities. Managers are offered a framework to guide service innovation and help them prepare for 2050. The paper also suggests areas for further service innovation research, zooming in on contextual changes to prepare for 2050.

This conceptual dissertation aims to build an integrative and transdisciplinary framework of market evolution by reconnecting the study of innovations and markets, with help from the service ecosystems perspective. The service ecosystems perspective offers a processual, systemic, and institutional view on value creation, which is grounded in the axiomatic assumptions of service-dominant (S-D) logic. Hence, the dissertation departs from the premise that value, when perceived, is always cocreated by multiple, institutionally guided actors in service ecosystems through service exchange and the integration of resources. The dissertation extends the conceptualizations of innovations and markets from a service ecosystems perspective, with the help of institutional theory. The resulting transcending conceptualizations are then used to reconcile the paradoxical tensions identified in the conceptualizations of innovations within service research and markets within marketing literature in order to synthesize their substantial contributions into a cohesive framework of market evolution. By connecting insights from five appended papers and the reconciled literatures, the dissertation develops a recursive four-phase process model of market evolution as institutional dynamics of multi-dimensional value cocreation structures. The model explains how innovations as proto-institutional value cocreation structures emerge and how markets as institutionalized value cocreation structures evolve through institutional work carried out by multiple actors aiming to either maintain or disrupt a prevailing market. By beginning to unravel the institutional processes and market shaping strategies contributing to market evolution, the dissertation provides guidance to actors who are interested in markets and their development.

This conceptual dissertation builds an integrative and transdisciplinary framework of market evolution by drawing on and extending the service ecosystems perspective. With the help of institutional theory, the dissertation develops transcending conceptualizations of markets and innovations to reconcile and reconnect the discussion on markets in marketing literature and innovations in service research. By synthesizing insights from the reconciled literatures and five appended papers, the dissertation develops a recursive, four-phase process model of market evolution as institutional dynamics of multi-dimensional value cocreation structures. The resulting framework provides guidance to actors aiming to either maintain or disrupt a market.

This paper addresses the implications of an emerging, increasingly important way of thinking about markets: systems thinking. A market is one of the most foundational abstractions in marketing and business research; yet, it often receives too little attention. As a result, the taken-for-granted assumptions about markets spur from over-simplified conceptualizations of neoclassical economics that depict markets as static and mechanistic. Systems thinking represents a major change in perspective that involves transcending this mechanistic worldview and thinking instead in terms of wholes, relationships, processes, and patterns. We argue that building a theory of markets based on systems thinking, would enable scholars to develop more realistic models that correspond with fast-changing business environment and therefore, increase both the rigor and relevance of future research. To further this aim, we identify the main implications of systems thinking and formulate them into a research agenda to further the systemic understanding of markets. 

In this paper we build on a view of change and innovation stemming from institutional complexity in service ecosystems, that is, institutionally enabled and constrained systems of service systems, and give suggestions on how such conditions can be designed to facilitate innovation. We conceptualize service ecosystems as near-decomposable complex systems in which change is enabled through the co-existence of alternative, overlapping and conflicting institutionalized views on problems and solutions, and draw from social network theory to understand how such institutional complexity emerges both between and within actors in service systems. We then connect these theoretical insights with practice and give guidance on how institutional complexity can be created and how opportunities for interaction and collaboration between diverse and conflicting views on problems and solutions can be fostered.