“Service Research Priorities: Designing Sustainable Service Ecosystems” is the second Service Research Prioritie (SRP) article of this year published by the Journal of Service Research, following up the companion article presenting SRPs related to “managing and delivering service in turbulent times” (see here, about Ostrom et al., 2021).
This article highlights the critical importance of scholarship and practice related to the design of sustainable service ecosystems, and the need to expand the boundaries of service research beyond service encounters (i.e., employee-customer, organization-customer) to include the interrelationships among multiple stakeholders, including, organizations, platforms, societies, and the environment. The service-ecosystems lens allows to gain a systemic understanding of value creation grounded in the socioeconomic context, and to focus on the institutional mechanisms that govern service exchange. The article also emphasizes the importance of utilizing a transformative service research (TSR) perspective to solve critical issues of human concern, including sustainability, inclusiveness, access, and justice, and helps shape a more socially aware and responsible discipline.
These two complementary lenses—service ecosystems and TSR—undergird three SRPs, which potentially represent the future frontier of service research:
– large-scale and complex service ecosystems for transformative impact (SRP5),
– platform ecosystems and marketplaces (SRP6), and
– services for disadvantaged consumers and communities (SRP7).
Similar to the companion article (Ostrom et al., 2021), this article was the result of a multi-year collaborative effort of the author team along with hundreds of service scholars and practitioners to unveil important long-term challenges that cross disciplinary boundaries and are in urgent need of future research and solution.
For example, we found that the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals were salient among both scholars and practitioners, who emphasized the importance of eliminating poverty, ensuring equity and dignity, building peaceful and inclusive societies, and protecting the planet to support future generations. Not surprisingly, the resulting research priorities that emerged from this analysis focus on designing sustainable service ecosystems.
Together, these priorities highlight the importance of designing responsive and resilient ecosystems, innovative and responsible platforms, and deliver services that enhance the well-being of disadvantaged consumers and communities. We call out the importance of engaged scholarship that measures impact in terms of how well we understand and solve critical societal issues, rather than metrics such as article citations and h-indices. To this end, we provide scholars with the necessary tools to engage in problem-centered research with members of other disciplines (e.g., public policy, health sciences). Throughout the article, we emphasize the importance of big solutions and innovative thinking to tackle current and emerging service problems, and identify the need for thoughtful and evidence-based policy development and implementation. We see the need for service scholars to engage with policymakers to help build the sustainable and just ecosystems that motivated these priorities; and hope to ignite scholarship that contributes to the development of sustainable service ecosystems.
Read the article here.
