Towards a Concept of “Governance as a Smart- Service” in Service-Oriented Value-Creation-Systems

Abstract: The course of the digital transformation of economy, work and society as well as increasing pressure from hyper individualized demand on the one hand and on the other hand issues that ask for global action, like pandemics or climate change, paves the way for new smart service-oriented forms of value creation, thus, solutions enhanced by new technological possibilities that transcendent corporate or individual routines and restrictions of human coping with complexity. Future Service Business thrives with seamless interaction in the conscious providing and coupling of resources, i. e. products and services, physical and digital elements, manpower and competencies, massively supported by and dependent on data and analytics in business-ecosystems. In order to create this “seamlessness” a new quality of conjoint value creation on strategic as well as operative level is necessary, that helps balancing value co-creation and value co-destruction in coopetitive multi-actor-ecosystems. Research on modelling processes for sustainable and resilient “governance as a smart service” is presented that deep dives on possible ways to combine the relative strenghs of digital evaluation and human decision. The research question if governance design for resource integration in new service business ecosystems can be provided “…as a smart service” itself is approached with two focal assumptions on resource integration in service-oriented ecosystems: firstly, the creation of a common, overarching value proposition for the customer (promise making externally) has to be complemented by value propositions for each contributing actor involved on the provider side (promis making internally). This will enable the governance function to know about and adress the costs of collaboration. Secondly, the design of common operational processes for key activities that meets internal expectations is crucial (promise keeping of the ecosystem). This will enable the governance function as well as mulit facetted actor practices to meet expectations and rely on fullfillment of collaborative quality by each actor in the value creation system. For the formulation of innovative value propositions we refer to the concept of value proposition design (Osterwalder et al 2015, Chesbrough, 2007). We aim to find out, to what extent the elements of the concept in the customer sphere: jobs to be done, pains, gains, can be transferred to the internal perspective of ecosystem partners and what adjustments are necessary in formulating value propositions in internal perspective. In the solution sphere of the Value Proposition Design concept with the elements: products & services, pain relievers, gain creators, we explore to which extent these are suitable to map the perspectives of the actors involved in order to derive reference processes of resource integration regarding the commonly shaped value propositions, internally and externally alike. The view formulated by Grönross (2011, 290), that in service-oriented value creation processes of different actors run simultaneously and a number of dialogic processes lead to an integrated process of coordinated action is modified. Our starting point is the need for a structured and digital augmented multilog and the goal is the design of a number of suitable common processes and standards with a resource-integrating bridging function between the original business models of each contributing partner in the system and the collaborative business model of the ecosystem as system of systems. This includes looking at virtual instances in the (re-) design of governance processes that support collaboration in a balance between independence and dependency (Malone, 2018, Freund / Spohrer, 2013).

Keywords: governance, smart services, multi-actor-ecosystems, coopetition

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002574

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