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The purpose of this paper is to understand the strategic management of a technology-enabled shift from a product-centric to a service-centric logic and to identify the sociotechnical dynamics underlying this transition. The study focuses on how manufacturers manage to create value in industrial markets through digital servitization.

An abductive research approach is used to investigate two manufacturing firms, and an interpretive framework is used as an analytical template. A cross-case analysis is conducted.

The case companies strategically managed sociotechnical processes of digitization to co-create value. Their service orientation delineates dissimilarity in terms of digital servitization. It reflects a viable ecosystem that moves toward datatization through adaptation in one case and a viable ecosystem that moves toward digitization through reconfiguration in the other case.

A theoretically grounded, empirically informed framework is proposed to detect transformational mechanisms to manage value co-creation in digitally servitized contexts, thus contributing to ecosystem viability.

This is the first study to adopt a system perspective such as the viable system approach combined with service-dominant logic to reconceptualize the overall sociotechnical processes and the underlying mechanisms leading to digitized value creation. In line with a systems view and a systematic process based on a transformative attitude toward digital servitization, the empirically informed framework identifies specific co-creation activities and recursive feedback loops.

The aim of this paper is to understand if service innovation (Helkkula et al., 2018), based on artificial intelligence (AI) systems, may guarantee healthcare service ecosystem (H-SES) well-being (Frow et al., 2019; Beirão et al., 2017), taking into account that many doubts relieved in terms of transparency may compromise the patients' perceived quality of health services provided through AI systems.

A literature review on service innovation, detected in terms of value co-creation, and service ecosystem, investigated in terms of well-being, is drawn. To analyze the implications of service innovation on a H-SES well-being, through the technology acceptance degree and predisposition to use by actors, a case study based on TAM-model 3 determinants as categories is carried out.

AI-based service innovation archetypes in healthcare may be considered as antecedents of the service ecosystem well-being conditions as long as they enable actors to co-create value. To make it possible, a patient-driven service innovation is necessary in order to mitigate the risks of its inactivity due to fears in terms of transparency.

Service innovation and service ecosystem well-being may be studied in an integrated way, with a multidisciplinary approach, and are linked by value co-creation, because only thanks a patient-driven service innovation is possible to foster service ecosystem well-being in healthcare.

Service organizations operate in an increasingly complex and uncertain context that makes decision-making challenging. Despite well-recognized changes in the operational context of government as service organization, service literature has given surprisingly limited attention to what these changes imply for organizational decision-making. This study aims to face with the lack of fit of decision-making theorizing with the reality, within which most service practitioners operate, in order to foster the relevance of decision-making in service research and properly approach the false assumptions and misguided instructions for action.

To rectify the situation, the purpose of this paper is to advance a more holistic understanding of decision-making in government as service organization. The authors do so by reviewing the sparse, though insightful, prior literature on decision-making in service research and identifying four foundational assumptions of decision-making in the service context, that radically differ from the traditional assumptions of decision-making within the wider management literature.

The authors contribute to service research by further advancing the emerging dynamic understanding of decision-making by developing eight systems thinking-informed research propositions and a connected research agenda. In doing so, the paper offers the essential ground work that can revitalize the field of service management and equip it for facing the challenges that government as service organization is encountering in the 21st century.

The formulated eight research propositions demonstrate that decision-making in a government as service organization occurs within complex adaptive systems composed of multiple subsystems and is characterized by a high degree of unpredictability. It is a process influenced by multiple actors part of the system and subsystems, through multiple feedback loops, where the implications of prior decisions inform the future decisions.