Ville Eloranta

Seeking competitive advantage with service infusion: a systematic literature review

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the service infusion literature explains competitive advantage through services. The four strategic management theories – competitive forces, the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, and relational view – are applied in the analysis. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review analyzes the links between the service infusion and strategy literature. Findings – The review reveals that although discussion of service infusion applies strategic management concepts, the stream lacks rigor with respect to construct definition and justification. Additionally, contextual variables are often missing. The result is an over-emphasis of contextually bound measures, such as technology, and focal actors. Research limitations/implications – The growing trends toward social networks, co-specialization, actor dependency and shared resources encourage service infusion scholars to focus on network-related and relational capabilities, co-opetition, o...

Overcoming Institutional and Capability Barriers to Smart Services

Smart services have potential to improve value creation and profitability of industrial firms and their customers. Defined as services that go beyond the upkeep and upgrades, traditionally bundled with products and helping companies to build intelligence— that is, awareness and connectivity. Combined with digitalization, services have had a major role in improving efficiency of existing offering and enabling new channels for service delivery. Implementing the change toward smart services is challenging. Research shows that especially industrial companies maintain institutionalized beliefs and attitudes impeding the transformation, lack capabilities and resources for implementation, and face industrywide norms and relationship practices resisting the change. The study explores the barriers in adopting smart services and is implemented as a multi-case study among six globally operating industrial companies. Our findings indicate classification of internal barriers, capability gaps, and external barriers, contributing a framework that describes the interplay between institutional forces and capability development in organizational change.

Material Intelligence: Cross-Organizational Collaboration Driven by Detailed Material Data

The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has the potential to reshape inter-organizational collaboration across industries. This study explores the influences of the use of IoT for information sharing in the steel industry networks. Shared data may have multiple uses, including optimization, integration, automatization, and adaptation of objects in their environments. To date, research on IoT has mainly proposed its use in independent nodes and clusters possessing excessive data from their own actions. Conversely, our study emphasizes the benefits that accrue from intensified collaboration. Our findings emphasize that IoT enabled material intelligence can restructure the existing steel industry networks. This can be achieved by bridging the structural holes in the inter-organizational networks.

Service Artifacts as Co-creation Boundary Objects in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms are systems consisting of a platform owner and complementary and interdependent components. Service artifacts are boundary objects created by the digital platform owner that engage the end user and facilitate the knowledge processes required for value co-creation. These service artifacts function as communication mechanisms in the front end of the virtual platform, operating between the platform and the end user. We present three categories of service artifacts based on their functioning logic and the type of interaction. Working from the theory of boundary objects, we argue that database service artifacts, character artifacts, and artificial intelligence artifacts facilitate personalized value co-creation for each user individually in addition to helping the end user understand the service processes and the variety of offerings available in the platform. We present examples of different types of service artifacts that illustrate these principles. The concept of a service artifact is discussed from the viewpoint of service-dominant (S-D) logic.