This paper aims to transcend the division of ‘economic’ and ‘social’ innovations by drawing from the emerging service ecosystem perspective. This view has three fundamental implications on innovation. First, it offers unifying basis for considering all human collaboration as value co-creation through direct and indirect service exchange. Second, it portrays innovation not as a novel output, but as an institutional change in how value is co-created. Third, it conceptualized value co-creation simultaneously framed by multiple nested ‘levels’ of institutional context which bridges the micro and meso level analysis more common to ‘economic’ innovation with the macro level of ‘social’ innovation and provides the conceptual grounds for leveraging valuable insights from both domains to build a more unifying theoretical basis for innovation.

Kaisa Koskela-Huotari (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Oulu), Jaakko Siltaloppi (Aalto University, Helsinki), Stephen L. Vargo (University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu): Transcending the division of ‘economic’ and ‘social’ innovation

Presented at the 24th Annual RESER Conference, September 11-13, 2014, Helsinki, Finland.

rucforsk.ruc.dk/site/services/…/54095762/RESER_2014_Proceedings.pdf