Situated provider-customer interaction as an arena for continuous service innovations

This paper combines service and innovation research streams with the practice-based CTA-approach. Continuous service innovation is defined as complex customer- and network-centric value co-creation by resource re-bundling creating novel resources for beneficiaries and embedded in everyday business and work activities in and between organizations. Firstly, we build a renewed, integrative conceptual frame for structuring provider-customer interaction by combining strategic and operational aspects and the perspectives of both parties. The framework provides a context for studying transformation towards service-orientation, focusing on a situated interaction level. Secondly, we structure a theoretical and methodological approach on situated and socially constructed general logic of action and knowledge intra-organizationally and between the provider and customer organizations. This reciprocal collaboration is studied as a source and realization of continuous service innovation. This paper is more conceptual in nature. However, some tentative empirical results are presented from two case studies as illustrative examples so as to enable the next phases of the ongoing research project. Finally, suggestions are made for further study.