Co-create value innovation as a resource integration process

Purpose. S-D logic and service science are reframing the conceptual landscape of business. From these perspectives, performing business means for firms to act as resource facilitators and integrators, connecting service systems via value proposals. The aim of the paper is to analyse innovation as a value-creating process occurring through many-to-many resource integration. The article will argue for a merging of innovation, S-D logic, and network approaches. Methodology. A case study has been carried out. First, we selected a highly innovative firm and focused on conception of and approach to innovations. In detail, we investigated six innovation projects within three main research streams. Then we identified the innovation projects’ networks. The problem of network boundaries (who and where) was handled by focusing the study on the main actors involved in the innovation projects. By studying the interaction and integration process that takes place between the network’s partners, we have been able to highlight innovative patterns, resource contribution to innovation, and the value co-creation process. Findings. Innovation is a network affair, carried out through interaction and with an integration process in which several actors participate as advocated S-D logic. This changes the traditional vision of innovation, in which the supplier is the innovator and the customer a user or source of innovation. Customers and other stakeholders become the real co-innovators, and the innovation process is developed by continuous interactions among stakeholders through which they develop, exchange and integrate resources and co-create value. Partners and networks are seen as a set of potential resources that are to be matched through new value proposals and that need actualisation to create new value in use. Practical implications. A company or a service system should develop the innovation process, managing the contribution of the network’s members and considering both B2B and B2C/C2B (as well as C2C) interactions part of an integrated, complex context (many-to-many). Innovation development should be framed as an open process in which all of the network’s actors can mobilise resources and be co-innovators, co-producing value innovation as a step toward creating value for themselves and for the others. To develop open innovation, managers should draw on the potential of resources, competencies, and talent—not only inside the firm, but above all, from the residents of its ecosystem. Research implications. There is a clear need to develop further researches where innovation is framed as a resource-integrating process. Studies could widen the unit of analysis from firm to network and from dyadic to multiple actors, and enlighten us further as to the antecedents and implications of the interaction and integration process. Originality/Value Framing innovation with S-D logic allows companies and other service systems to move the locus of innovation from product to value, supporting service flow and transforming their understanding of value from a vision based on units of the firm’s output to one based on processes that integrate resources. Innovation is a key theme in service science. This paper offers a wide perspective on innovation to frame the phenomenon using a service-dominant logic, highlighting the role of the network in developing value-creating innovation (processes and results) as instrumental to increasing stakeholder value.