Building Strategic Partnerships for Value Co-Creation : A Conceptual Framework for Digital Service Organizations
In today’s competitive, fast-paced, and technology-driven markets, digital service organizations are increasingly forming strategic partnerships to transform their businesses, accelerate innovation opportunities, and offer customers enhanced value. How these partnerships should be built to enable value co-creation and strengthen collaboration between the partner organizations has thus become an important question for research and practice. This research develops a conceptual framework to explain value co-creation in strategic (digital service) partnerships and identifies its key enablers. We contribute to the literature by expanding our understanding of how value co-creation between partner…
Evolution of strategy narration and leadership work in the digital era
This paper examines the evolution of strategy narration, contributing to ongoing discussions in this field. Our empirical data, gathered from a large Finnish co-operative bank, cover three decades. According to our findings, digitalisation has brought about an epoch change in strategy narration, as top management has strongly adopted digital media in their leadership work, which has replaced ‘traditional’ face-to-face strategy meetings and public presentations by gatherings on digital platforms, including webcasting, intranet and Skype. This has brought about a leadership vacuum, and left organisational members long for their superiors to ‘exercise’ some traditional leadership practices, su…
Functional and Structural Roles of Data in Service Ecosystems
Data play an increasingly important role in today’s service ecosystems, where actors integrate resources to create value at different levels of aggregation (micro, meso, macro). To advance our understanding of the role of data in such contemporary data-rich service ecosystems, we draw on the service-dominant (S-D) logic and data ecosystem literature. Extending the current understanding of data in the literature, we demonstrate how data and data ecosystems have become intertwined with service ecosystems and how data as a meta-resource connects actors, enhances systemic visibility, and drives innovation in these ecosystems. peerReviewed
Managing the communicative organization : a qualitative analysis of knowledge-intensive companies
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how employees' work-related communication is managed in knowledge-intensive organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe study was conducted by applying an exploratory, qualitative approach. The data were collected from six knowledge-intensive organizations operating in the professional service sector in Finland, and the data set used included altogether 23 interviews.FindingsThe interviews confirmed that employees' work-related communication on social media is regarded as an increasingly important area, and that it has required companies to establish new managerial processes that are aimed to affect employees’ communication behaviors (ECB) eit…
What's in it for me and you? : Exploring managerial perceptions of employees' work-related social media use
PurposeThis study focuses on managers' perceptions of employees' communicative role in social media, and explores the changes in the contractual nature of employment relations in mediatized workplaces in which the boundaries of professional and private life are becoming more fluid.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was employed to explore this relatively new phenomenon. The data, comprising 24 interviews with managers responsible for corporate communication and human resources in knowledge-intensive organizations, was thematically analysed.FindingsThe analysis shows that employees' work-related social media use creates new types of exchanges and dependencies between an organi…
Work-Related Social Media Use : The Mediating Role of Social Media Communication Self-Efficacy
Social media use has become an indispensable part of knowledge work. Employees posting work-related content on social media are considered credible sources of information and have significant importance for how stakeholders, such as potential customers and future employees, perceive the organization. Therefore, employees’ ability to communicate about their work on social media has become a competitive advantage both for individual employees and for their organizations, especially in the professional service sector. Hence, understanding the role of employees’ ability to use these social media professionally is crucial for understanding the communicative behaviors of contemporary knowledge wo…
Managing Continuous Digital Service Innovation for Value Co-Creation
Service organizations across various industries are increasingly implementing continuous development methods and practices to transform their digital service innovation and development processes. Consequently, continuous digital service innovation (DSI) has become a way to react to today’s dynamic markets by proposing value to customers quickly while maintaining service quality. However, little is known about how organizations can enable value co-creation (VCC) in their continuous DSI processes. We fill this gap in the literature by focusing on organizational-level continuous DSI processes. Based on findings from 23 industry informants from six Finnish digital service organizations, we pres…