CHAPTER 6. Conclusion
6.4 Discussion
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interested in interaction pattern research to work on.
6.4 Discussion
The novel view of interaction we presented offers substantive implications for business and strong standing position of system thinking. However, besides the grand notion of system thinking that entities interact to create outcome in an ecology, we borrow some key concetps from the current system thinking framework. Instead of embracing the whole traditional system thinking framework within our research, we discovered some other perspective of system thinking by focusing on a specific value type.
The system thinking model separates interactions into two categories – value proposition generated and governance mechanism facilitated. In our research, the concept of value is throughout our whole theory development and experiment design.
We mapped different possible values - service innovation value levels to different combination of interaction patterns; also, we used acquirable customer number as the value measurement of our experiment. These are all focusing on the value to be created from interaction of entities, thus our research results shall be classified as following the value proposition generated part. However, the main discovery we found in our research that is worthy of further discussion is that our interaction concept does not follow how system thinking described the structure of interaction value proposition.
Within our research, the interaction for service innovation could be perceived as two elements, the current interaction pattern and value proposition. Interaction pattern describes how the interaction is preformed, and regulates its possible maximum, like we defined that having interaction pattern level three with two different types of entities could possibly lead to a level of major innovation of service innovation in
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their system, and the four constructs: trust, power dependence, cooperation and expectation and entity type will classify how the interaction is.
The value proposition then expatiated the desired outcome of both sides through a process of value’s proposal, agreement and realization. The proposal indicates the original value that each side desired, but after the negotiation process it will be altered and become the accepted agreement between entities. Realization then stands as the final value proposition of entities, but also might be altered when putting the value into a bigger ecology scope; also, the final value might feedback to the entity and the interaction patterns. In our research and experiments, the proposed mechanism facilitated by the information system is tackling the proposal part by providing a model for SMEs to imagine and considers what level of service innovation that they shall try, and the agreement part by providing cases to support them in achieving the desired value.
Combining our concepts of interaction patterns and value propositions, an abstract model of our discovery could be found in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1 Abstraction Of Interaction Pattern And Value Proposition Relations And Constructs
This give rises to a new way to consider system thinking framework. The key
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point of our discovery is that we have different emphasis on the value with traditional system thinking structure: system thinking model considers the outcome in a wide variety form, but we perceive value only in a specific type (service innovation levels). Although sacrificing the ability to fit into different cases, the advantage of focusing and constraining the variety of value is that it makes system thinking structure become more adaptable to business analysis, and concentrates the user on value creating process within interactions. By using this concept, business users could possibly know more about how their interactions with other entities will influence their final outcome, and could tackle the issue by managing the interaction pattern or value proposition.
Moreover, when intend to adapt the system thinking and interaction pattern to areas other than service innovation; we discovered that researchers could possibly do so by finding new mapping logic of value proposition with interaction patterns.
For example, if the researcher intends to use interaction pattern to measure business performances, they could use the interaction pattern we defined, but change the service innovation level to different categories of business values and map them together; or also, they could keep the service innovation value we used, but extend the interaction pattern types to smaller but more accurate patterns to measure the service innovation better. In other words, while the concept of outcome is restricted in the norms of business and customer’s value, researcher could extend the notion of how interaction pattern and value proposition interacts with each other to create service innovation to other areas by changing different types of interaction pattern or value proposition, and the mapping reason behind them.
This notion of changing interaction pattern and value proposition types for new areas makes interaction pattern and value proposition all an entity-like concept,
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which is able to be replaced by new corresponding entity for a new purpose, and coherent with the service science’s norm: operant, because it is able to be altered by and could manipulate other entities. Combining with current system thinking structure and aforementioned value focused interaction, we could possibly derive a new system thinking framework based on the current system thinking concept but better for a service and business purpose. The following Figure 6.2 is our proposed adjustment, which we believe, though not a grand modification, but is a novel idea for system thinking theory usage and worthy to note.
Figure 6.2 Value Oriented System Thinking Structure.