服務系統實體互動樣式基礎下之服務創新 - 政大學術集成

全文

(1)國立政治大學資訊管理學系. 碩士學位論文指導教授:苑守慈博士. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. 服務系統實體互動樣式基礎下之服務創新. ‧ er. io. sit. y. Nat. n. al v i n C h Based Uon Interaction Service Innovation engchi Patterns of Service System Entities. 研究生：許岫天中華民國 101 年 6 月.

(2) ACKOWLEDGEMENT The accomplishment of this thesis must be ascribed to a lot people’s efforts. In the very beginning, I would like to thanks the person who plays the most important role in my two-year graduate life: Prof. Yuan Soe-Tsyr. Her passion to research encourages us to overcome every predicament in these two years, and her always-positive attitude shows us a different side of life. Besides research, her great care of our life lighted us, make us brave enough to pursue dreams and the original intentions of attending the graduate school. Her guidance, attitude, devotion to us will never be forgotten.. 政治大 AeSL family in words, but立 it is no doubt one of the things that happens best in my Also, it’s hard to say my thanks and how lucky I am for becoming a part of the. ‧ 國. 學. two-years graduate life. Mika, who guide us through many problems within the research; Andrew, who provide precious hints when I’m in confusion of my research;. ‧. the other ImageCons members: Claire, Diana, Kenny and Sherry who forms our. sit. y. Nat. conformable and warm lab by laughing for silly things together, arguing for. n. al. er. io. conflicting ideas furiously, sharing dreams and stay up all night to make the system. i n U. v. works out with passion, are all my precious friends and valuable ally when facing. Ch. engchi. challenges. It’s my honor to meet all of you, and also any other people who I shall say thank you, but cannot due to the limited page length. At last, thanks to Tzu-Chen - the cornerstone of my life - who provides the strongest and dearest support to me when facing any awful times. Thanks to them, I could finish my graduate school, and go on to the next step of my dreams.. Claude in AeSL 2012/7/23 I.

(3) Abstract Research to date discovered two gaps restricts the existing service innovation theories from full support for SMEs - who also require good service innovation theory to innovate and to survive in the fast-pacing market - which are: goods-thinking-based service innovation logic and incomprehensible service innovation theory for SMEs. In this research, we share and enhance the vision of system thinking researchers interaction plays the very basis and important role in service value creating and delivering - as our theory foundation. Founding on this interaction-centric notion, we. 政治大 could do service innovation 立by adjusting business interactions, and justify it with a. propose an easy-to-adapt service innovation methodology which suggests that SMEs. ‧ 國. 學. comprehensive model evaluated by simulation techniques and a prototype supporting information system mechanism to provide support for SME users. Last but not the. ‧. least, at the end of this research, we re-examine the system thinking framework with. sit. y. Nat. our discoveries, and signaled a possible adjusting direction of the framework for more. n. al. er. io. value-oriented purposes. From the practical view, we identify a way to extend the. i n U. v. current system thinking theory to a practical model for real world SME’s service. Ch. engchi. innovation purposes. For the academic research, our interaction-centric service innovation methodology is believed to enhance the to-date system thinking theories. In addition, we also identify several future possibilities for academic researchers in this field to discover.. Keywords: System Thinking, Service Innovation, Interaction Patterns, Service Dominant Logic, SME. II.

(4) TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................ 1 1.1. Background and Motivations.................................................................. 1 1.2. Research Question & Objectives ............................................................ 3 1.3. Research Methods .................................................................................... 6 1.4. Purpose and Contributions ..................................................................... 8 1.5. Content Organizations............................................................................. 8 CHAPTER 2.LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................................11 2.1 Service Innovation in SME Sector........................................................... 11 2.2 Alliance....................................................................................................... 15 2.3 Interaction ................................................................................................. 18 CHAPTER 3. MOTIVATION APPLICATION ..................................................30 3.1 Service System Design: A Sign-Value-Based Approach ......................... 30 3.2 ImageCons Project .................................................................................... 31 3.3 ImageCons System Architecture.............................................................. 33. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. CHAPTER 4. INTERACTION PATTERN BASED INNOVATION RECOMMENDATION MECHANISM ..............................................36. ‧. 4.1 Conceptual Framework ............................................................................ 36. n. al. er. io. sit. y. Nat. 4.2 System Architecture .................................................................................. 40 4.3 Data Collection Module ............................................................................ 43 4.4 Interaction Pattern Recognizing Module................................................ 52 4.5 Interaction Pattern Adjusting Module .................................................... 61 4.6 Alliance Adjustment Guidance Module .................................................. 68 4.7 Annotation Module ................................................................................... 72 CHAPTER 5. Evaluation ....................................................................................76 5.1 Propositions ............................................................................................... 77 5.2 Experiment Details for Proposition 1 ...................................................... 79. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 5.3 Experiment Details for Proposition 2 ...................................................... 89 5.4 Experiment details for proposition 3 ..................................................... 100 5.5 Discussion of Findings ............................................................................ 113 CHAPTER 6. Conclusion ................................................................................. 117 6.1 Contributions........................................................................................... 117 6.2 Managerial Implications ........................................................................ 119 6.3 Limitations and Future Works .............................................................. 120 6.4 Discussion................................................................................................. 122 6.5 Conclusions .............................................................................................. 125. III.

(5) LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Ten core concepts of service science ......................................................... 5 Figure 1.2 Illustration of the interaction model ........................................................ 7 Figure 1.3 Information systems research framework ............................................... 9 Figure 2.1 10 types of Innovation ............................................................................. 12 Figure 2.2 Illustration of interaction model ............................................................ 19 Figure 2.3 Propositions on objectives, capabilities and interfaces for the different service types ................................................................................................................ 22 Figure 2.4 Interaction patterns and constructs mapping diagram ....................... 28 Figure 3.1 The main mechanism components behind imagery creation .............. 32 Figure 3.2 Architecture of Goal Imagery Creation ................................................. 32 Figure 3.3 ImageComs System Architecture ........................................................... 34 Figure 4-1. Conceptual Model .................................................................................. 38 Figure 4.2 System Architecture ................................................................................. 41 Figure 4.3 Data Collection Module Example .......................................................... 48 Figure 4.4 Evaluation processes of the interaction patterns .................................. 51 Figure 4.5 Data collection module process ............................................................... 51. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. ‧. Figure 4.6 The types of possible service innovation ................................................ 54 Figure 4.6 Top-down approach (1) ........................................................................... 63 Figure 4.7 Top-down approach (2) ........................................................................... 64 Figure 4.8 Top-down approach (3) ........................................................................... 64 Figure 4.9 Top-down approach starts over again with a different starting point 64 Figure 4.10 Top-down approach adjustment algorithm ......................................... 65 Figure 4.11 Bottom-up approach .............................................................................. 66 Figure 4.12 Bottom-up approach (2) ........................................................................ 66 Figure 4.13 Bottom-up approach adjustment algorithm ....................................... 67 Figure 4.13 Example of an anonymous company’s innovation case’s case. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. classification............................................................................................ 70 Figure 4.14 Example of the case classifying based on the selected patterns to improve, and automatic proper case selection .................................... 71 Figure 4.14 Case classification and automatic proper case selection algorithm .. 71 Figure 4.15 Example of annotation module support during data input process Figure 5.1 Example of SME’s alliance and customer acquiring ............................ 83 Figure 5.2 New service obtained per new partner .................................................. 87 Figure 5.3 Marketing increased per new partner ................................................... 88 Figure 5.4 Actual market size distributions of all settings ..................................... 88 Figure 5.5 Results of Setting 1 .................................................................................. 93 IV.

(6) Figure 5.6 Results of Setting 2 .................................................................................. 94 Figure 5.7 Results of Setting 3 .................................................................................. 94 Figure 5.8 Results of Setting 4 .................................................................................. 94 Figure 5.9 Comparison of improvement ratio of average customer acquired under all settings ........................................................................................ 95 Figure 5.10 Average number of customer acquired by SMEs under each setting......... 96 Figure 5.11 Comparison of the accumulations of abilities and marketing under different settings ......................................................................................... 97 5.12 Random Choosing .............................................................................................. 98 5.13 With Strategy...................................................................................................... 98 Figure 5.16 Data Collection Module enter page .................................................... 104 Figure 5.17 Adding new entity ................................................................................ 104 Figure 5.18 Dragging and drop the entity to desired location ............................. 105 Figure 5.19 Changing the Trust construct of entity by clicking the Trust button ....... 105 Figure 5.20 Call out the questionnaire input box to fill in the data more accurately .. 105 Figure 5.21 Results of Peter’s input ....................................................................... 106 Figure 5.22 Pattern Adjusting Module- without system support ........................ 107 Figure 5.23 Pattern Adjusting Module- with system support .............................. 107. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. ‧. Figure 5.24 Pattern Adjusting Module- After selected a target SME ................. 107 Figure 5.25 Pattern Adjusting Module- After selected a target SME, the system will change the candidates automatically .......................................... 108 Figure 5.26 Pattern Adjusting Module................................................................... 108 Figure 5.26 Case selection interface – entering page ............................................ 110 Figure 5.27 Case selection interface - Case content .............................................. 110 Figure 5.28 Case selection interface – after selected one case .............................. 111 Figure 5.29 Case selection interface – after all required cases are selected ........ 111 Figure 5.30 Case selection interface –All selected cases will be displayed after submit ..... 111 Figure 6.1 Abstraction Of Interaction Pattern And Value Proposition Relations. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. And Constructs....................................................................................... 123 Figure 6.2 Value Oriented System Thinking Structure. ....................................... 125. V.

(7) LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 Comparison of existing service design/innovation tools .................. 13 Table 4.1 Questionnaire details .......................................................................... 46 Table 4.2 Influence of poor performing construct on interaction patterns ... 49 Table 4.3 List of the influence of poor performing questions on the constructs ............................................................................................................................... 50 Table 4.4 . Interaction patterns mapping with Service innovation level ........ 60 Table 4.5 Information required for the system to provide support for the SME users ....................................................................................................................... 73. Table 5.1 Exemplar alliance constraints ............................................................ 85 Table 5.2 Details of each setting ......................................................................... 86 Table 5.3 Factors relation ................................................................................... 92 Table 5.4 Details of each setting ......................................................................... 93 Table 5.5 Types of system evaluation method for different situation ........... 101 Table 5.6 Other SMEs details ........................................................................... 103 Table 5.7 Interaction Details of other SMEs ................................................... 103. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. VI.

(8) CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Background and Motivations “The business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.” (Peter Drucker, 1973).The importance of service innovation has been highly recognized by business for years. Yet in past decades, “When top management is surveyed, their priorities in order are: finance, sales, production, management, legal and people. Missing from the list: marketing and innovation. ” (Jack Trout, 2006).. 政治大. While business are marking itself an innovative company, and campus courses are. 立. teaching students the importance of innovation throughout their entire university life,. ‧ 國. 學. it might be unfair to say that innovation is “missing” from business. However, not only Jack Trout make such a comment, but some academic research also stated that. ‧. business are doing service innovation in terms like holding the stores open for more. Nat. sit. y. hours, or starting an e-commerce campaign(Berry et al., 2006),which might hard to. al. n. innovation.. er. io. say is “innovative”. A gap lies between the actualities and the theoretically of. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. This inconsistency seems weird, but actually is not surprising for some people. A fundamental change of business environment – from goods dominant market to service oriented customers, had taken place for two decades(Peers Insight LLC,2007) ; the major industrialized economies, including the United States and the European Union, experienced a dramatic economic shift from goods to services; and also, the traditional ways of competition in goods market had come to an end in service era for many reasons, examples like customer bargains power rising, information technology boost, global competition and regional alliance. Researchers stated that the alternated competing foundation is resulting the inconsistency, while business are still applying 1.

(9) the notion of innovation well-established during the manufacturing epoch but service innovation are requiring something different, discrepancy occurs (Hipp & Grupp, 2005). The difference in goods and service innovation occurs from their very essences, while the value of a goods is decided only by the producers, the value of a service is determined by different parties – the producer and the customer. (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). While doing goods innovation, the efficiency and the appearance of the products are the core, and enterprise paid high for products invention and marketing.. 政治大 the service; service provider only provide their value proposition to the customers, 立 But in terms of doing service innovation, how the user use the service is the heart of. and the value actually created from the service is co-decided by both the service. ‧ 國. 學. provider and user. So both the provider and consumer plays important role in the. ‧. value creation process of a service, but the value is leaved for manufacturer to decide. sit. y. Nat. only in terms of goods. The divergence form a great gap between service and goods. io. messed up the two.. al. er. innovation since the designing method are contradictory, and making most company. n. v i n Aside from the discrepancy C of the fundamental thinking h e n g c h i U of goods innovation and. service innovation, another issue about the user the service innovation theory is developed for also emerges along with the proceeding service innovation researches. While service innovation is an important issue for companies to tackle with, the needs of service innovations are not limit to the FORTUNE 500 only, it also greatly influences the small and medium enterprises (SME) which are companies that are limited-resource, cannot compete in cost and efficiency ( Boly et. al,2000). However, even though plenty of service innovation supporting theories and models exists, due to the divergence between wealthy big companies and SMEs - difference in capital resource and know-how to do innovation - makes most of the theories and 2.

(10) models not appropriate for SME’s situation (Kaufmann & Todtling, 2002). Considering the great share of GDP that SMEs are holding, supporting SMEs develop their own innovation compatibility has become critical (Hoffman et al, 1998). We’ve briefly introduced the current situation of existing service innovation’s theories in this section and two statements are given: (1) service innovations are different from goods innovations, while most theories and businesses are still using the old-fashioned goods point of view still, improvement is needed (2) service innovations are different for big companies and SMEs, since existing theories are. 政治大 way to go. Combining the two becomes our intended contribution for this research 立 putting more emphasis on innovation for big companies, supports for SMEs are still. goods dominate logic, and support SMEs use with ease.. sit. y. ‧. Nat. 1.2. Research Question & Objectives. 學. ‧ 國. provide a service innovation theory that can avoid the shortcomings of preceding. io. er. A notion called service system proposed by Aronson (1997) - a service was created during interactions between actors under a governing mechanism - was giving a good. al. n. v i n point to start on understanding C the difference between h e n g c h i Ugoods and service innovation.. In service system researches, researchers focus on the interactions between multiple actors that creates values for interacting parties, the notion was closed to the concept of the service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) which states that – in service, resources like alliance partners and end customers are operant resources, can be influenced by and influencing other resources to co-create value; while in goods, alliance partners and end customers are operand resources, passively influenced by other resources, like the manufacturer – thus service system provides a concrete theory architecture for successor to take hands on. In a service system, the final outcome is produced and decided by the interactions 3.

(11) between entities, like a barber interacts with its customers to deliver the hair-cutting service. The final hair style is not only based on barber skills, but also must take the customer’s hair’s status and the entire circumstances into account. In different salon and with different customer, the outcome hair style could vary, and while customer has different tastes, a same style might have totally different customer satisfaction. It is important to have this in mind before doing any further studies of service innovations. Another excellent example is given by Aronson(1997) to show how could system. 政治大 described that when a special species of harmful insects appears, it is easily for 立. thinking be useful in service innovation. In a given agricultural case, Aronson. farmers to seek for new pesticides to eliminate the new incomers. However, if the new. ‧ 國. 學. insects (insect A) are very resistant to pesticides, then the farmer needs to use a. ‧. stronger pesticide to achieve the desired result. The problem in using the new. sit. y. Nat. pesticide arouses – it might kill other insects (insect B) that could kill insect A. If the. io. er. number of insect B decreases more than insect A, than the new pesticide could possibly cause a totally negative effect to the crops. Hence, the farmer shall consider. al. n. v i n not only about harmful insect A,Cbut shall also think about h e n g c h i U any other factors or entities that are involved within the system (the farm).. The following Figure 1.1 from Demirkan (2011) can explain the concept of the service system more clearly. An entity in a service system could consider as an actor, who can have actions influencing others, and the interaction is how multiple entities working together, the outcomes are created during the interaction. Following this concept, we could consider that any service innovation is an attempt to change the service outcome of a system to a more innovative aspect; accordingly, it will be useful and important to understand the whole system to see the big picture of the service innovation. To examine the system thoroughly, one must figure out not only who 4.

(12) those entities are and what’s their outcome, but more importantly how they interact. By understanding the way they interact, we could knew the system better, and come up with solutions to change their interactions, and thus alternates the final service outcome of a same set of entities.. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學 ‧. Figure 1.1 Ten core concepts of service science (Demirkan, 2011). sit. y. Nat. n. al. er. io. However, while we are saying service innovation as an innovative change in the. i n U. v. outcome value of a service within two entities: provider and consumer, and interaction. Ch. engchi. is how the outcome created, we are actually indicating an even more important notion: interaction is the key of service innovation. Reasons are that if all the values are created by the interactions of entities, then it is suggesting that any service innovation in the system is actually derived from the change in interaction, since innovation is a type of value changing. For example like Apple’s Ipod, it is changing the way how a mp3 manufacturer interacts with its customers - from product provider to a music service facilitator; another example is like Dell’s up-to-build service is actually altering the density and purposes of customers interactions with the company, and also it changes the interaction of Dell and equipment manufacturer. Accordingly, 5.

(13) when the interaction is changed, and changed to a more innovation-friendly state, we could possibly expect the innovation within the system will be more likely to happen, and it breeds the concept of the possibility to do service innovation by interaction manipulating. After understanding the way how service is provided by business and why system thinking provides good support in studying it, we could embrace the concept of the importance of interaction and use it as our theory foundation to find possible service innovations. The next question to solve is how to generate adequate service. 政治大 mechanism, and how SMEs could follow the recommendations by themselves with 立. innovation recommendations from system thinking without incomprehensible. ease.. ‧ 國. 學. Concluding, the issues this research aims to solve lies under:. To discover the possibility and effectiveness of using interaction as a. ‧. 1.. y. sit. To develop a service innovation theory which is based on the. io. er. 2.. Nat. foundation to create a service innovation theory.. interaction-centric notion while remains an easy-to-adopt feature and good. n. al. guidance for SMEs. 3.. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. To implement a prototype system to demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of the .. 1.3. Research Methods In this research, the main topic we would like to discuss is how to use interaction to create a method to analyze SMEs and its environment, and provide innovation direction and implementing guidelines from the mechanism. However, business interaction is alike human interactions, includes numerous actions, exchanges, episodes that influence the interaction, and requires a long period 6.

(14) of time to form (Håkansson, 1982). This characteristic of interaction makes it difficult to be analyzed, especially for SMB. The following Figure 1.2 could see the study results of business interaction analyze done by IMP group.. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. Figure 1.2 Illustration of the interaction model. Nat. y. ‧. (Adapted from Håkansson, 1982). io. sit. Although complexity is the nature of interaction just like many other complicated. n. al. er. questions, there are still mechanisms exists to solve this predicament. For example,. i n U. v. pattern recognition. Pattern Recognition is an interdisciplinary subject, covering. Ch. engchi. developments in the areas of statistics, engineering, artiﬁcial intelligence, computer science, psychology and physiology, which is well-used since 1960 (Fukunaga, 1990). With patterns, the limitless contents of an interaction can be classified into limited categories, provided a chance to break down for further understandings. Concluding, to study business interactions, we intent to use the interaction patterns between different entities as our analysis method and innovation insights creating source, we defined three problems that are required to be solved for this purpose: 1. How to define business interaction patterns that are fitting to our purpose. 2. How to analyze the business situation and fit into interaction patterns we 7.

(15) defined. 3. How to provide innovation insights from interaction patterns.. 1.4. Purpose and Contributions The purpose of this research is to propose a methodology for SME to use in order to find the possibilities to do service innovation. In doing so, there shall be two following contribution of this research: (a) From the theoretical perspective, we provide a brand new method to assess. 政治大 thinking and service dominant logic theory. This new attempt will provide a 立. SMEs with the use of interaction patterns which originates from system. new model for other researchers to study or to apply in different areas;. ‧ 國. 學. moreover, it will likely to enlighten new perspectives of system thinking. sit. y. Nat. concepts and further extends them.. ‧. usages since its theory foundation is embodying system thinking’s core. io. er. (b) From the practical perspective, we provide SME owners with a useful approach for discovering innovation directions and the way to implement it,. al. n. v i n C h have difficulty U fulfilling the gap that SME in using innovation supporting engchi theory to generate a path to follow.. 1.5. Content Organizations The research framework of this research is presented below in Figure 1.3, which is from Design Science in Information Systems Research (Hevner et al., 2004). The following will briefly describe how each chapter corresponds to the framework ( we will use “IS research framework” as a shorter name for information system research framework in the following paragraphs). In the first chapter, we firstly described the environment of our research topic to 8.

(16) provide a clear understanding of the situations: Based on our observation and opinions from previous researches, we could see a current problem for SMEs (people) is that they are not granted with enough service innovation methods and tools (technology) to compete with other companies within the industry (organization) and survive (business needs). To answer their needs, we intend to integrate concepts from system thinking and service science with information technologies enabling tools to support SMEs in facing their difficulties by boosting their innovation capability (application).. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學 er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. n. v i n C h systems research Figure 1.3 Information e n g c h i U framework (Adapted from Hevner et al., 2004). Chapter 2 will then present the relating research done by others who have also seen the same problem, serving as a footstone of this research. Relating research are interaction, alliance, and service innovation. These fundamental knowledge will show the state of the art in service innovation theory, and also serve as the basic of the theory construction and as a comparison to position this research. The knowledge base section of the IS research framework will also be included in this chapter. Chapter 3 shall describe the research results of previous related works, and the 9.

(17) position of the to-be-proposed mechanism in the whole research project. Corresponding to the IS research framework, Chapter 3, alike Chapter 2, are serving for the knowledge base section of the framework, but rather from a wider and higher point of view. Chapter 4 will then explain the proposed mechanism in details, and work as the conceptual map of this entire research; in other words, Chapter 4 will become the theories and artifacts within the Develop / Build section in the IS research framework. Chapter 5, following the theory section of this research, will give the evaluation. 政治大 in Figure 1.3. Conclusions, limitations and future research of this research will then be 立. details of our mechanism, which serves as the justification section of the framework. given in Chapter 6 to summarize this IS research.. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 10.

(18) CHAPTER 2.LITERATURE REVIEW. This chapter will illustrate the current conditions of the relevant researches to give a whole picture of the state of the art. There will be three sections within this chapter: service innovation, alliance, and interaction patterns respectively. Firstly, we will describe the current knowledge of service innovation and the importance it is to SMEs; a comparison of the existing theory will be given to state the possible problems of current research too. The second section will depict the linkage between service. 政治大. innovations and alliance, and the corresponding researches about the benefit and. 立. managing issues of alliance. The last section within this chapter is the introduction of. ‧ 國. 學. interaction and interaction patterns, and an explanation between alliance and interaction and how interaction works for SME’s service innovation will be stated.. ‧. Relating to the information system research framework in Figure 1.3, section 2.1. Nat. sit. y. (service innovation current researches) will depicts the current status of service. n. al. er. io. innovation of SMEs, to reinforce the environment part of the IS research framework. i n U. v. of this research in more theoretical way; section 2.2 and 2.3 will serve as the. Ch. engchi. knowledge foundation and the supporting theory base of the framework.. 2.1 Service Innovation in SME Sector Due to the changing trend of the world, service sector are getting higher portfolios in the economic, relating researches thus populated to follow this tide of changing. Service innovation is one of the major topics of these popping researches (Djellal et. al., 2003 ; Tidd and Hull, 2003); innovation brings competency to business, and is especially important in the world of servicisation (Toivonen & Tuominen, 2009). Ten types of service innovation was proposed by Doblin group (Insight, 1999), are 11.

(19) depicted in following Figure2.1.. 治政 Figure 2.1 10 types of Innovation (Adapted 大from Insight, 2007) 立 ‧ 國. 學. However, these researches of service innovation do little help to the business, and much service company’s service innovations are still limited to types like holding the. ‧. stores open for more hours, or starting an e-commerce campaign (Berry et al, 2006).. sit. y. Nat. One of the reasons for the limited help of these innovation related research is. n. al. er. io. because the innovation in service and in products is different from the very basic; that. i n U. v. is, the value is created by manufacturer in products, but co-created by both consumer. Ch. engchi. and provider in service (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Compared to the highly developed innovation methodology in manufacturing, the notion of service innovation is not yet integrated well with other existing theories (Johnson et al, 2000). A very important concept was proposed by Tatikonda and Zeithaml (2001) which said that service innovations requires more interaction between development and the delivery process than product innovations. However, existing famous service design/innovation methodology rarely views from the lens of interaction, or some only takes little into account, the following table2.1 listed the comparison.. 12.

(20) Table 2.1 Comparison of existing service design/innovation tools Service design innovation tools. and Concept/ Design Principle. Focus & Features. Service Blue Printing. Embed blueprint technique into Process base (Flies & Kleinaltenkamp, service designing, differentiating 2004) the customer-induced and customer-independent activities to design process. corresponding. service. Design Thinking (Brown, 2008). Use intensive brainstorming True demand of the observation techniques and iterative customers process, rapid prototyping to capture the customer’s needs.. TRIZ (Altshuller, 1999). Formalized and intensive guidance Problem formulation tool that uses 40 inventive principle to compose a service innovation. SEE (IDEAS, 2008). A mixed method of above Problem Formulation mentioned three service innovation Customer Observation tools. 學. ‧. io. sit. y. Nat. al. er. ‧ 國. 立. 政治大. Moreover, two features were not listed in above table 2.1. The first is that these. n. v i n service innovation tools requireC intensive to use; TRIZ requires discipline of h e n training gchi U problem formulation, SEE method requires the same training too; service blueprinting. needs the user be very familiar with the process and process modeling; design thinking as the most un-structured method requires people that are innovative and good at observation. For big companies, training lessons can be arranged; high quality human resource can be hunted, but not for SMEs (Kaufmann & Todtling, 2002), due to their company size and resources. Secondly, while SMEs are easily affected by the environment, it will be helpful if the service innovation theory could take the environment more into consideration; in 13.

(21) other words, the service innovation theory shall see both in micro perspective while not neglecting the big picture. For example, if a producer decides to open an online store to contact its customer directly, their website could be developed well by using the blueprinting skills, but might not notice the possibility that creating a direct connection with customers could ignite its retailer’s anger, and cause the total sales decreases. Big companies with abundant analyst might be aware of this due to their training in business knowledge and are in no need of support, but SMEs could possibly incautious about this issue without proper reminding. By using system. 政治大 more easily for them to avoid the pitfall. 立. thinking theory, and considers in the way of interacting with other entities, it will be. However, SME sector plays an important role in economy all over the world. In the. ‧ 國. 學. Greater China region, 95% of employed people are in SME’s section in Taiwan. ‧. according to Ministry of Economic Affairs in 20101; in China, 60% of the GDP are. sit. y. Nat. contributed to SMEs, and 80% of employed people in the city are in SME’s section. io. er. according to Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China2 reports in 2009. SMEs portfolio in United States are not lesser. al. n. v i n C haccording to U.S.USmall Business Administration than SMEs in Greater China region, engchi and the Office of International Trade 3, SME sector employs 99.5% of all employer. firms in 2008; and in EU, 99.8% of employed firms are SMEs (Eurostat, 2008). This makes a clear notion: SME sector plays a very important role in the economy, and shall not be ignored. However, base on our previous arguments, aforementioned service innovation tools might not cover every aspect of SMEs service innovation needs. 1. Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2010, http://www.moeasmea.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=9504&ctNode=689&mp=1 2 Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China, 2009 http://www.miit.gov.cn/ 3 U.S. Small Business Administration and the Office of International Trade, 2008 http://www.sba.gov/ 14.

(22) Concluding this section, we state two problems of current researches in previous paragraphs, which are: (1) service innovation tools needs to be based on interaction because the nature of service, (2) based on the importance of SME sector in economic and their difficulties, an easier and guidance free service innovation tool is necessary to fulfill this existing gap. This section supports the environment part as the current technology of the IS research framework by indicating the current available service innovation techniques for SMEs and its insufficiency, and the following two subsections - alliance and interaction patterns - will illustrate the fundamental theory of this research’s knowledge base.. 立. ‧ 國. 學. 2.2 Alliance. 政治大. Alliance was always considered as a solution for SMEs to compete and survive. ‧. (Miles et al, 1999). Through alliance, SME are supposed to be able to develop new. sit. y. Nat. competence, obtain crucial resources, improve access to market, achieve scale. io. er. economies and strengthen firm reputation (Varadarajan & Cunningham, 1995). Innovation is also benefiting from alliance, the importance of inter-firm alliances in. al. n. v i n C h recognized by U innovative activates were also widely the industry (Hagedoorn, 2002), engchi. for the reason that alliance with firms in unfamiliar domain can lower the risk and cost for the innovation (Linnarsson & Werr, 2004), or can obtain key resources and knowledge the newly innovated service requires (Dickson et al, 2006). To conclude, alliance enables the implementation and enhances the performance of the innovation; for companies building alliance to do innovation, it was called “joint innovation” (Cowan & Jonard, 2008). Innovation could be done in two different ways: one is to decide the expected outcome of the innovation first and then gather the resource it needs to accomplish the goal; the other one is to start from gathering resource and then consider what 15.

(23) innovation can be done by these resources. So a company can start innovation from deciding the final result, or can figure out the resource it owned first and then decide what to do next. As for alliance, it means a company can start an innovation campaign first and then find partners for support, or make sure who is partner and what resource it can obtain before starting the innovating activities. The two directions form two different views to the innovation-alliance relationship. The first is a top-down approach; ideas are generated first and then try to use alliance to meet the bottom line of the resources needed. The second one is a bottom-up approach; SMEs make sure. 政治大 brainstorming for an innovative idea. 立. the alliance partners first and thus understand what resource can obtain before. Innovation is inherently a risk taking thing (Rothwell, 1992); one of the major. ‧ 國. 學. possible failure factors is resource and capability constraints of the innovation. ‧. (Hadjimanolis, 1999). While this is similar for both large companies and SMEs,. sit. y. Nat. SMEs still face a more significant influence of the resource constraint in innovation. io. er. (Hewitt-Dundas, 2006). Relating this argument with the top-down and bottom-up approach of innovation, for SMEs the bottom-up approach defines the accessible. al. n. v i n C h the pain point ofUSME’s innovation to the front resource first, which means it moves engchi stage of innovation process because it makes unfeasible innovation ideas closed at. early stage and it decreases the time cost of the innovation failure. So the bottom-up approach of innovation-alliance is better for SMEs innovation, since it lowers the entire risk of innovation. Another issue in the innovation-alliance relationship is the performance of the alliance. The management of the alliance is a main topic within that field (Ireland et al, 2002; Rothaermel & Deeds, 2006; Duysters et al., 1999); for all the benefit it could be achieved by an alliance, poor managing will make the positive result of alliance goes to negative results (Hamel, 1991), and other research already proposed contrary, 16.

(24) opposite opinion of the innovation-alliance relationship due to the risk and uncertainty of alliance (Miles et al., 1999; Chi, 1994). However, despite the negative result of alliance, SMEs are not given choices to choose in innovation, with respect to the poor resource it usually has (Hewitt-Dundas, 2006). This means the selection and managing of the partners will count greatly on the SMEs innovation process. Research argues that there are five factors to consider in the partnership building (Whipple & Frankel, 2000): trust, management, ability of partners, clear goals, compatibility.. 政治大 alliance is from the interactions between entities (Spohrer et al, 2011), we argued that 立 Nevertheless, from the point of view of system thinking, the value created from an. good interaction is the true key of a successful alliance. Also, as a service innovation,. ‧ 國. 學. Tatikonda and Zeithaml argued that it requires intensively interaction between the. ‧. innovation creator and the result deliver (Tatikonda & Zeithaml, 2001). Accordingly,. sit. y. Nat. to create a successful alliance that can boost innovation, we could choose interaction. io. factors.. al. er. between the partners as the focal issue as a replacement of the aforementioned five. n. v i n Extends the notion of usingC interaction to manageUalliance to service innovation hengchi. creating, since we argued that interaction is a more service oriented perspective, we. probably could anticipate this perspective will provide an alliance structure that is more likely to be service-innovation-targeted. Furthermore, the interaction based alliance managing could inherent the benefit of innovating through system thinking: consider things in a broader view. Concluding, alliance could provide the important resource SMEs required in service innovation building, also it lowers the risk of failure or the destructive force of unsuccessful innovation project. To guarantee the alliance to provide proper service innovation insights, or to assure the alliance is service innovation dedicated, chances 17.

(25) are we could use interaction as a method of alliance managing. The discovery of this notion not only enhanced our foundations in the knowledge section of the IS research framework, but also enables us to forward our research to discover how to use interaction to manage the alliances between SMEs.. 2.3 Interaction From the SD-logic view (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), service is different from product because the actor of the value creation is different; while a product’s value is. 政治大 and consumer. This feature makes service a more complicated concept than product 立. determined by the manufacturer, the value of a service is co-created by the provider. because service involves more actors that are needed to be taking into consideration.. ‧ 國. 學. To understand the complicated nature of service, we can use the science of system. ‧. thinking to analysis service more systematically (Spohrer & Maglio, 2010). A service. sit. y. Nat. system is a bunch of actors, which called entities here, like individuals, groups,. io. er. business, even nations, interacting under a specific scope to co-create value for each other entities. In a service system, entities provide their own value proposition and. al. n. v i n Cahgovernance mechanism interact with other entities under to create value outcomes engchi U. (Spohrer et al, 2011)( also see Figure 1.1) . Deem to the work of system thinking, we can analyze a service by separating it into three parts to have better understanding: entities, interaction, and outcome. In this research, we aim at the interaction part. Long before the interaction concept was proposed in service science or system thinking, the industrial and market (IMP) group have perform intensive interaction-related researches for years. According to the IMP perspectives, they argued that interaction is the core of the research of the relationship and network perspective of business markets, because it is the basis of the business transaction and basically the smallest analytical unit (Håkansson, 1982; Snehota & Håkansson, 1995; 18.

(26) Naude & Turnbull, 1998; Turnbull & Valla, 1986). One of the key researches of IMP group about interaction was proposed by Håkansson (1982), in the research, Håkansson stated that interaction of business shall be considered in a more macro scope; he separated interactions into four types of elements to study: interaction process, interaction parties, interaction environment, and interaction atmosphere (Figure 2.2).. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學 y. Nat. sit. n. al. er. io. Figure 2.2 Illustration of interaction model (Adapted from Håkansson, 1982). Ch. engchi. i n U. v. The interaction process can be divided into short term and long term; the short term process is the actual exchanging process that happens between businesses, and the long term process is the aggregation of the relationship which builds within the exchanging process. The interaction parties are the businesses that involving in the interaction, which are separated into organization and individual, by which organization is the company itself, and the individual usually refers to the person that interacts with another company’s representative. The environment is the business environment in which the interaction is taking 19.

(27) place, which considers the structure of the market and the dynamism, internationalization, position, social system. The environment is the outcome of businesses within the same industry, the society, and government’s brawling. The last one is the interaction atmosphere surrounding every interaction that the businesses are having. The atmosphere can be considered in terms of power dependence, cooperation, closeness, and expectations. All the factors within the atmosphere are affected by the environment, parties, process of the interaction, and are affecting them vice versa. Atmosphere is built through times, and is a dynamic. 政治大 However, even though the IMP interaction model expatiated the interaction well, 立. factor that is changing and influencing the entire interaction condition all the time.. there are some statements against their research. One of the arguments is about the. ‧ 國. 學. level of complexity of IMP interaction model. An IMP group research done by. ‧. O'Farrell & Moffat (1991) applied the IMP interaction model as the basis of their. sit. y. Nat. research, but mentioned about its considerations of the complexity of the IMP. io. er. interaction model. Håkansson (2002) indicated that interaction patterns are important and in some business marketing strategy businesses tend to aggregate interactive. al. n. v i n choices into specific interactionC patterns. Wynstra et alU(2006) also stated that no large hengchi. scale efforts of investigating the interaction patterns around service, which they. considered as a gap that needs to be fulfilled in their research. An interaction pattern is the outcome of pattern recognition, which is a process that a specific individual trying to understand complicated and unrelated-like events as an identifiable patterns of behavior (Matlin, 2002). The pattern approach was widely used in many fields, like computer science, human interaction, psychology and physiology, business, artiﬁcial intelligence, and social science (Hannemann & Kiczales, 2001; Stark et al, 1962; Fehr, 2004; Hemelrijk, 1990; Barros et al, 2005; Fukunaga, 1990). However, not much interaction pattern related research can be 20.

(28) found, and most of the research only states that interaction have patterns (Halinen, 1997; Turnbull & Ford & Cunningham, 1996; Håkansson, 2002; Woo & Ennew, 2004). One of the researches with handful content of interaction patterns was given by Wynstra et al (2006). In Wynstra et al’s research (2006), they defined interaction patterns in terms of different service types, which are component, semi-manufactured, instrumental, and consumption. Each interaction pattern stands for a specific type of service that a supplier provides to its customer. For example, a supplier might not actually make. 政治大 component service type’s interaction pattern; so the supplier and customer are having 立 components for its customers; however, the way they serve their customer fits the. the component type of interaction pattern between them.. ‧ 國. 學. Different patterns have different objectives, capability requirements of supplier and. ‧. customer, representatives of supplier and customer, and the following Figure 2.3 can. sit. y. Nat. highlight their works. For managerial persons, one can apply to these different groups. io. er. of patterns after clearly assessing how their customers use their service for further improvement direction and key point of the service. And for academic research. al. n. v i n C stressed research on ongoing U h e n gintensively i h c. contribution, previous. production and. delivery of service, this research rather aims on the supporting activities and resources of these processes. Also, this research adds in customer perspective, which enables to identify the similarities in the business interaction between services in different industry while most previous research mostly focusing on a specific industry (Wynstra et al, 2006). This research of Wynstra et al’s (2006) provides a good example of how interaction patterns works for business and how to study them. However, we argue about two things: service system not only has a buyer and a supplier entity, but also other related entities; and also shall interpret more on how each interaction patterns was occurred. 21.

(29) We do more explanations in the following paragraphs. In a service system, the final outcome of value is co-developed by entities (Spohrer, et al, 2011), applying this concept to alliance, this means the value of the alliance is created by both sides. Take the supply chain perspective into alliance, there exists more than supplier and customer entities these vertical entities, but also exists other organizations like competitors and non-competitors that need to collaborate with to create value (Simatupang et al, 2002).. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Figure 2.3 Propositions on objectives, capabilities and interfaces for the different service types (Adapted from Wynstra et al’s, 2004).. At the meanwhile, alliance might not only occur only in a one-to-one type, a concept of alliance constellation was proposed, that is a company will form alliance with multiple companies to compete with other alike groups of companies (Gomes-Casseres, 1997). The advantages of alliance is obvious, so does the advantage of alliance with more than one company The benefit of alliance constellation was 22.

(30) classified into five items(Gomes-Casseres, 2003): linking to market, combining skills, building market momentum, reducing costs, sharing risks. The mentioned “combing skills” advantage was said to be able to create a new business or compatibility for the alliance. According to Juttner et. al (2007), they stated that to become a market winner a company shall have advantages on both marketing and supply chain, which we can refer to the concept that constellations build strong supply chain through multiple companies, and have strong linkage with the downstream market-closer companies shall be able to bring them victory in the industry. Leenders and Wierenga (2001). 政治大 companies that wish to have excellent new product development, also can adhere to 立 stated that integrating marketing forces and R&D capability is a major concern of. the concept that for companies that have strong supply chain for the product or service,. ‧ 國. 學. alliance with proper marketer and R&D facilities is a great choice. Concluding, SMEs. ‧. have much more alliance choices and combinations that need to be considered than. io. er. patterns that Wynstra et al’s (2006) have mentioned.. sit. y. Nat. the four service types regarding only customer-supplier relationship of interaction. A second consideration of Wynstra et al’s (2006) research is that the content of the. n. al. Ch. interaction patterns they defined did take little. engchi. v i n from U the IMP. interaction model. actually. One of the reasons that the IMP interaction model involves less in their research is because most of the four elements of the IMP interaction model (process, parties, and environment) was closely related to the specialty of a specific industry, involving too much IMP interaction model might jeopardize their researchs without loss of generalities. However, the IMP interaction model was still a great analysis framework for interaction researching, and we argued that it shall be concerned more in interaction patterns constructing. The last element within the IMP interaction model that was not excluded because of industry dependent is the interaction atmosphere (Spencer & Sutton-Brady 1996). The 23.

(31) atmosphere is a long-term variability of interaction which is influencing and influenced by the interaction; the atmosphere is surrounding the interacting entities and affecting the process that the interacting entities are taking, and also the outcome of the process will influence the atmosphere of the interaction (Håkansson,1982). Due to the long-term feature the atmosphere is having, we argue that using atmosphere in the interaction patterns can reflect the condition of the interaction. Although the IMP group have did much research on interaction, according to another IMP researchers (Woo & Ennew, 2004), they have argued that constructs of. 政治大 argued that the construct of atmosphere is including a great diversity of research 立. the interaction atmosphere are not unshakeable. Young and Wilkinson (1997) have. related to the business relationship managing, but the heart of the atmosphere actually. ‧ 國. 學. is the competitiveness and cooperativeness of the business, and also the trust between. ‧. the alliance partners. Hence, our next step is to make sure every constructs within the. are appropriate to embed.. io. er. sit. y. Nat. atmosphere, which are power dependency, cooperation, closeness and expectations. The power dependency is about the degree that one company is able to influence its. al. n. v i n partner, and also whether one C company is able to survive h e n g c h i U with or without another company’s existence (Håkansson, 1982). The measurement of the power dependence. is customer preference, completeness of line, sales, human resource, brand image, accessibility to market information (El-Ansary & Stern, 1972), which we argue to be related with the competitiveness of a business. While highly related with the competitiveness of business, power dependency seems appropriate to be a construct of interaction atmosphere. The closeness of companies is another construct of the atmosphere, however, mentioned by Håkansson(1982), in which closeness is a construct that a company must manage well in the interaction, while too close or indifferent are both not a good 24.

(32) interacting condition, which is quite different to the power dependence construct that is the higher(or lower) the better. On the other hand, the high closeness of company with another company often result in high power dependence (Turnbull et al, 1996) which Håkansson (1982) had agreed that the closeness of two partners will reflect on company’s power dependence degree. Another argument of closeness coming from Laing and Lian (2005), they stated that closeness of companies is the basic of trust while companies are high in closeness, the level of trust or the easiness of forming trust is usually higher than other companies. Since closeness is crossing both trust and. 政治大 argue that instead of keeping closeness, it is better to keep the power dependence 立. power dependence, which is referring to the competitiveness of the atmosphere, we. construct, and add the trust construct into atmosphere measuring.. ‧ 國. 學. The rest of the constructs are cooperation and expectations. While the construct of. ‧. the cooperation is referring to the compatibility of two companies’ ability and the. sit. y. Nat. willingness to cooperate (Håkansson, 1982), it is naturally same to what Young and. io. er. Wilkinson (1997) had argued; so it is fitting to the revised atmosphere constructs without questions. Meanwhile, the importance of expectations is agreed in many. al. n. v i n C h had stated that ability business related researches, research expectations and outcome engchi U. expectations of the company are decisive factors of starting a new venture or not, (Townsend et al., 2008), marketing researches had put emphasis on managing customer’s expectations for years(Gronroos, 2008; Parasuraman et al, 1988), and business alliance related research also devoted efforts on discovering how to manage expectations (Arino & Ring, 2010; Barney, 1986;. Royer & Roland, 2009).. Moreover, a value proposition of another company could be also considered as forming expectation for the exchanger; accordingly, expectations serve as an important factor as well as any other constructs. Concluding, we suggest that all the constructs of the interaction’s atmosphere shall be taken into consideration in the 25.

(33) interaction between two companies. Summarizing the previous paragraphs, we are stating two arguments against Wynstra et al’s (2006) research. The first one is that interaction patterns in alliance relationship shall be more than only one-to-one, customer-supplier relation; instead it shall be patterns that involving lateral companies, and is multiple-to-multiple relation. The second one is that the IMP interaction model shall be more involved with proper revising, which we have the four construct involving in the interaction patterns: power dependence, cooperation, trust and expectation.. 政治大 the different service types of a supplier to the customer, adding lateral companies into 立 However, while Wynstra et al’s (2006) interaction patterns categories are based on. the interaction patterns will create countless service types belongs to lateral-supplier. ‧ 國. 學. and lateral-customer interactions, which are considered not feasible for this research.. ‧. Instead, we argue that the interaction patterns shall be categorized by the roles of. sit. y. Nat. entities it is partnering with, which are customer, supplier, and lateral entities.. io. er. Moreover, within this research, the customer and supplier entity are defined in a broader definition to cover wider diversity of different industries. The customer entity. al. n. v i n Ch will be defined as both customers and all the entities U that could help linking the SME engchi. with its current customer or bridge connection with new customer. The supplier entity will be defined as both material suppliers and all the entities that hold the key resource or knowledge which can improve the SME’s current products or services quality. (We will still use customer and supplier to call these entities in the following paragraphs to maintain the readability of this thesis) On the other hand, the original interaction patterns (Wynstra et al, 2006) only provide the best interaction pattern of a specific service type that can achieve a direction for managers to refer to. However, we consider that it will be more useful for manager if there are more different level patterns to compare and assess their 26.

(34) company’s status. By taking more patterns into the framework, the usability of this model could be expanded greatly from a directing-only function to more an analysis tool that are able to evaluate current condition and provide guidance to SMEs. Thankfully, the four constructs we have identified: power dependence, cooperation, trust, and expectation are originally having levels (Laing and Lian, 2005; Johnson et al, 1996; Chatman, Barsade, 1995); thus the interaction patterns using this four constructs are able to be classified into different levels of patterns. While low in power dependence, cooperation, trust, expectation are referring to a worse interaction. 政治大 cooperation, trust, and expectation corresponds to a better condition of interaction. In 立. with an alliance partner, indicating a need of improvement; high in power dependence,. consideration that lacking of levels will cause SME hard to assess their current pattern,. ‧ 國. 學. but an excessive number of levels will also cause diffusion, we here roughly define 3. sit. y. Nat. performance of the four construct (in Figure 2.4).. ‧. levels of interaction patterns: worst, average, and best, performed by different. io. er. Regarding to the concerns, we re-invent the interaction patterns of Wynstra et al’s (2006) research. First, the service types categorize method will be replaced by the. al. n. v i n C hthe role are supplier, roles of the alliance entities, which customer and lateral entities. engchi U Secondly, the interaction pattern which a SME belongs to could be measured by the. four constructs from the interaction atmosphere of IMP’s interaction model: power dependency, cooperation, trust and expectations. Lastly, the “only best” interaction patterns classification will be expanded into three levels of interaction patterns. Thus a SME company can have three levels of interaction patterns: worst, average, and best with three roles of alliance partners: customer, supplier, and lateral. Concluding, by the categorizing method we just mentioned, we defined proper business interaction patterns that are fitting to our purpose, responding to the first problem we mentioned in section 1.3 that we need to solved in order to fulfill this 27.

(35) research’s intentions. This adjusted interaction pattern framework could support us in alliance managing for service innovation, and further provides us foundations to forward to model-creating process for interaction pattern based service innovation theory. In Chapter 4, we will further describe how interaction pattern could be manage by different constructs, and how could interaction pattern manipulating leads to service innovation. To reiterate, this section, alike the previous section 2.2, is corresponding to the knowledge base part of in the formation system research framework.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. .. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Figure 2.4 Interaction patterns and constructs mapping diagram. This chapter had reviewed research from the following fields: service innovation, alliance, and interaction that are relating with the intention and foundation of this research. We have summarized ideas proposed in the previous sections into 5 five points in the following: (1) Existing service innovation tools shall consider interaction of the entities within the service system more to gain a stronger theory foundation. 28.

(36) (2) Existing service innovation tools are not mainly designed for SMEs while these tools require people well-trained of using these models, which SMEs usually lacks of, to exploit its value. (3) Alliance with other companies is one of the best ways for SMEs to do innovation since SMEs are scarce in innovation-necessary resources (4) The key of innovating through alliance is managing the interactions well. (5) Interactions can be classified into patterns to become more analyzable, and different patterns could possibly serve as measurements and guidance for SMEs. 政治大 These concepts provide the knowledge foundation of this research, and by linking 立 to follow and use to gain higher service value.. these concepts, we can form our theory base to solve the problem we have perceived.. ‧ 國. 學. By creating a service innovation supporting tool for SMEs to use, which are focusing. ‧. on concepts ignored in previous research but important (i.e., the interaction patterns. sit. y. Nat. within alliance partners), we can provide SME managers with a way to create their. io. n. al. er. own compatibility through innovation and survive in the competing market.. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 29.

(37) CHAPTER 3. MOTIVATION APPLICATION This research about interaction oriented service innovation is actually based upon a bigger research project – the ImageCons system, and serves as one of its components. The ImageCons system was also another component of an even bigger research project aimed at using sign value based approach to do service system design. This chapter will explain the Sign-Value-Based Approach research and ImageCons system project in details, and serve as the knowledge base corresponds to the IS research framework of this thesis.. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. 3.1 Service System Design: A Sign-Value-Based Approach Service system, as its definition, was a value co-production process, connecting. ‧. agreed value propositions and shared information of different parties of service. y. Nat. sit. entities under a configuration of people, technology, internal and external service. n. al. er. io. systems (Spohrer et al, 2007). Service providers who wish to deliver superior value to. i n U. v. its end customers has to rely on its competency, which are based on service provider’s. Ch. engchi. ability on service designing, engineering, performing, and managing the dynamic configurations of resources within the service system that can create value when arranged into systems working with other service systems (Spohrer & Maglio, 2010). However, an important intrinsic aspect of customer-centric values is the sign value approach addressing that the value arises from socio-cultural-environmental contexts and is subjective with the socially assigned meaning as the service outcome (Yuan, 2011). On the other hand, service system design refers to applying the design principles for dynamically configuring service system entities to co-create value specified by a given value proposition. Thus far, there are no systematic ways of 30.

(38) developing sign values based service systems. To this end, this project is a research agenda aims for sign value based service design, and using methodology of ICT-enabled sign value approach for service system design, which uses the sign value as a means for “concretizing” the essence of a service in terms of the sign value driving the “what” and “how” of service system design. The sign value approach project is composed of two parts: goal imagery creation and goal imagery delivery (Yuan, 2011). The first part aims to provide the methods that can effectively assist a SME to create its goal imagery. The second part contains a. 政治大 cooperation, and communicate. set of models that can enable SMEs within a geographical cluster that can locate appropriate partners, manage. 立. with customers to. provide the service solution featuring the goal imagery delivered to meet various. ‧ 國. 學. customers’ demands. The ImageCons system is designed to fulfill the first part of the. ‧. io. sit. y. Nat. 3.2 ImageCons Project. er. project.. The ImageCons system is an user-centered goal imagery creation process, a goal. al. n. v i n C h a dynamic co-creation imagery is to be co-created through network model drawing engchi U. upon the materials from a knowledge base of imagery bank, the user’s understanding of its context, and the user’s selection of service innovation FPOD form focus, followed by the testing of the prototyped stories demonstrating the meaning of the created goal imagery, Figure 3.1 provides a better understanding. Figure 3.2 is the information technology enabling method’s architecture that we have devised to exercise the model in Figure 3.1 in order to create goal imageries that could motivate SMEs to change their behavior. The step by step explanations of each part could be found in the following paragraphs: 31.

(39) Figure 3.1 The main mechanism components behind imagery creation (Adapted from Yuan, 2011). 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. Figure 3.2 Architecture of Goal Imagery Creation (Adapted from Yuan, 2011). (1) Understanding the context aims to provide the service innovation typology models that can represent and compare the capabilities, socio-cultural and environmental context. (2) Motivating story creation attempts to provide a short communication story 32.

(40) framework that can appropriately connect the elements of story with the content of the context in order to automatically generate communication stories that could move SMEs to engage the subsequent development of their goal imageries toward innovation. (3) Inspiring means the inner intangible level rehearsal of the selected focus of innovation. (4) Co-developing the goal imagery aims to provide the imagery model and the co-creation network model that can assist and facilitate the creation of the goal. 政治大 (5) Assessing the goal imagery intends to devise the measurement models that can 立 imagery with their customers and appropriate collaborators.. identify and quantify the gap between derived goal imagery and the current status. ‧ 國. 學. quo of the SME context.. ‧. (6) Testing the goal imagery attempts to provide the methods of interactively. y. Nat. prototyping the created goal imagery in terms of automatically generated full. n. al. er. io. sit. communication stories, followed by the SME’s subjective evaluation.. Ch 3.3 ImageCons System Architecture. engchi. i n U. v. Responding to the previous sections describing the ImageCons system background, we have defined the following system architecture (Figure 3.3) to accomplish the model. Explanation of the architecture can be found in the following: (1) The first part of the system refers to the understanding process in Figure 3.2 and was designed to understand SME user’s current situation. The understanding process will be conducted through two separated ways: interaction patterns approach and cultural analysis. Interaction patterns approach aims at collecting environment data of SME users, and co-create an innovation direction for SME user to consider. The cultural analysis was focusing on discovering the SME 33.

(41) user’s culture features that are applicable to add into its service innovation.. 立. 政治大. ‧ 國. 學. Figure 3.3 ImageComs System Architecture. ‧. (2) The second part is to provide a motivating story with the information the system. sit. y. Nat. collected. Analysis and evaluation will be done in advance, and will provide a. io. er. short story based on the input information from previous system. This part serves as a checkpoint for SME users to make sure the type of innovation they want to. al. n. v i n create before doing furtherCimage co-creation process, h e n g c h i U and also is designed to motivate the SME user to go on with the image co-creation process.. (3) The third part is planning to provide SME users the instrument to co-create image with other SME users. Users are encouraged to try multiple choices of images and through iterative working process to generate a final version of image. (4) The fourth part of the system is to provide an adjustable story prototype to convince the SME users to use the image, also works as a mechanism to test whether the image is robust and appropriate or not by using a story to give SME users a better imagination. (5) The last part of the system is the evaluation of the image, and it works all along 34.

(42) with the image-creation process. The system will analyze the current image that the SME user is actually providing to its customers, and the created-image will also be given a score to compare with current image.. This interaction pattern for service innovation research is aiming at the first part of the ImageCons system, which is using interaction patterns to understand SME user’s current environment and the desired service innovation they are hoping to achieve. More details about the mechanism of this research will be explained in following chapters.. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i n U. v. 35.