Due to rising online competition, increasing cost pressure and cross-channel customer journeys, stationary retail has tried to develop innovative value propositions and co-create value with customers through new technologies, which are expected to profoundly change the stationary retail’s service systems. Among other technologies, service robots are said to have the potential to revitalise interactive value creation in stationary retail. However, the integration of such technologies poses new challenges. Prior research has looked at customers’ acceptance of service robots in stationary retail settings, but few studies have explored their counterparts – the frontline employees’ (FLEs) perspective. Yet, FLEs’ acceptance of service robots is crucial to implement service robots for retail innovation. To explore FLEs’ acceptance of and resistance to service robots, a qualitative exploratory interview study is conducted. It identifies decisive aspects, amongst others loss of status or role incongruency. The findings extend prior studies on technology acceptance and resistance and reveal i.a. that FLEs perceive service robots as both a threat and potential support. Moreover, they feel hardly involved in the co-creation of use cases for a service robot, although they are willing to contribute.

This paper explores the integration of internal and external stakeholders in service innovation. Building upon the co-creative paradigm, the resource and knowledge integration of stakeholders in dynamic and complex service systems is gaining importance. This case study analyses the practice of stakeholder integration in a service innovation project at a German provider for medical appliances. We show that stakeholder integration is realised in the modes of reactive integration for the majority of stakeholders, whereas mutual integration is realised with members of the organisation, only. Customers are integrated as reactive resources throughout the innovation process, also informally and indirectly. The evidence from this empirical study suggests that stakeholder integration in service systems creates interdependencies between stakeholders and implicates that indirect ways of stakeholder integration have to be taken into account for project and stakeholder management.Keywords: service innovation; stakeholder integration; indirect integration; modes of integration; healthcare industry; service systems; case study research.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jonas, J.M. and Roth, A. Angela Roth is graduated in Business Administration. Subsequent to her studies she has been working at the Fraunhofer Institute for Supply Chain Services for five years -two years as the head of the department for decision support systems. During this period, she finished her dissertation on 'Modelling Warehouses in Logistics Networks'. After that, she had been a Research Assistant and finished her habilitation on 'Education in logistics -crucial competences for the future logistics industry' in 2010. Since 2011, she is an Associate Professor at the Chair for Information Systems 1 at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg researching on service innovation. 92 J.M. Jonas and A. RothThis paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'Stakeholder integration in service innovation -an exploratory case study on healthcare solutions development' presented at EURAM 2014, Valencia, Spain, 4-7 June 2014.

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