Purpose
While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contactintensive services – such as education, healthcare, and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of contact-intensive services – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this article is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling contact-intensive services to support ICTenabled service innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three contact-intensive services to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.
Findings
The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting, and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.
Research limitations/implications
While the findings reveal that the scalability of contact-intensive services is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in contact-intensive services.
Practical implications
The insights into the practices enable service providers of contact-intensive services to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.
Originality/value
This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of contactintensive services as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.
%0 Journal Article
%1 ls_leimeister
%A Kleinschmidt, Stefan
%A Peters, Christoph
%A Leimeister, Jan Marco
%D 2019
%J Journal of Service Management (JOSM)
%K contact-intensive_services dempub itegpub practices pub_cpe pub_jml pub_skl scaling_up service_innovation service_scalability service_scaling vertical_scaling
%N 4
%P 793-814
%R 10.1108/JOSM-12-2017-0349
%T How to scale up contact-intensive services: ICT-enabled service innovation
%U http://pubs.wi-kassel.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/JML_749.pdf
%V 31
%X Purpose
While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contactintensive services – such as education, healthcare, and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of contact-intensive services – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this article is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling contact-intensive services to support ICTenabled service innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three contact-intensive services to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.
Findings
The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting, and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.
Research limitations/implications
While the findings reveal that the scalability of contact-intensive services is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in contact-intensive services.
Practical implications
The insights into the practices enable service providers of contact-intensive services to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.
Originality/value
This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of contactintensive services as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.
@article{ls_leimeister,
abstract = {Purpose
While scaling is a viable approach to respond to growing demand, service providers in contactintensive services – such as education, healthcare, and social services – struggle to innovate their offerings. The reason is that the scaling of contact-intensive services – unlike purely digital settings – has resource limitations. To help ease the situation, the purpose of this article is to identify and describe the practices used in scaling contact-intensive services to support ICTenabled service innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
The research draws on an in-depth analysis of three contact-intensive services to examine service innovation practices. The analysis informs model development for service scaling.
Findings
The analysis uncovers three practices for service scaling – service interaction analysis, service pivoting, and service validation – and their related activities that are applied in a cyclic and iterative logic.
Research limitations/implications
While the findings reveal that the scalability of contact-intensive services is limited and determined by the formative characteristic of personal interaction, this study and its findings describe how to leverage scalability in contact-intensive services.
Practical implications
The insights into the practices enable service providers of contact-intensive services to iteratively revise their service offerings and the logic of creating value with the service.
Originality/value
This research identifies and describes for the first time the practices for the scaling of contactintensive services as an operationalisation of ICT-enabled service innovation.},
added-at = {2019-08-14T15:09:04.000+0200},
author = {Kleinschmidt, Stefan and Peters, Christoph and Leimeister, Jan Marco},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/284ec64441354919ebbc9e17a67034dbc/ls_leimeister},
doi = {10.1108/JOSM-12-2017-0349},
interhash = {6ae2375de1b529dde1586246a416f4b7},
intrahash = {84ec64441354919ebbc9e17a67034dbc},
issn = {1757-5818},
journal = {Journal of Service Management (JOSM)},
keywords = {contact-intensive_services dempub itegpub practices pub_cpe pub_jml pub_skl scaling_up service_innovation service_scalability service_scaling vertical_scaling},
number = 4,
pages = {793-814},
timestamp = {2022-08-31T13:46:28.000+0200},
title = {How to scale up contact-intensive services: ICT-enabled service innovation},
url = {http://pubs.wi-kassel.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/JML_749.pdf},
volume = 31,
year = 2019
}