Recent years have seen the emergence of physical products that are digitally networked with other products and with information systems to enable complex business scenarios in manufacturing, mobility, or healthcare. These "smart products", which enable the co-creation of "smart service" that is based on monitoring, optimization, remote control, and autonomous adaptation of products, profoundly transform service systems into what we call "smart service systems". In a multi-method study that includes conceptual research and qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we conceptualize "smart service" and "smart service systems" based on using smart products as boundary objects that integrate service consumers' and service providers' resources and activities. Smart products allow both actors to retrieve and to analyze aggregated field evidence and to adapt service systems based on contextual data. We discuss the implications that the introduction of smart service systems have for foundational concepts of service science and conclude that smart service systems are characterized by technology-mediated, continuous, and routinized interactions.

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Although many methods have been proposed for engineering service systems and customer solutions, most of these approaches give little consideration to recombinant service innovation. Recombinant innovation refers to reusing and integrating resources that were previously unconnected. In an age of networked products and data, we can expect that many service innovations will be based on adding, dissociating, and associating existing value propositions by accessing internal and external resources instead of designing them from scratch. The purpose of this paper is to identify if current service engineering approaches account for the mechanisms of recombinant innovation and to design a method for recombinant service systems engineering. In a conceptual analysis of 24 service engineering methods, the study identified that most methods (1) focus on designing value propositions instead of service systems, (2) view service independent of physical goods, (3) are either linear or iterative instead of agile, and (4) do not sufficiently address the mechanisms of recombinant innovation. The paper discusses how these deficiencies can be remedied and designs a revised service systems engineering approach that reorganizes service engineering processes according to four design principles. The method is demonstrated with the recombinant design of a service system for predictive maintenance of agricultural machines.

Confronted with decreasing margins and a rising customer demand for integrated solutions, manufacturing companies integrate complementary services into their portfolio. Offering value bundles (consisting of services and physical goods) takes place in integrated product-service systems, spanning the coordinated design and delivery of services and physical goods for customers. Conceptual Modeling is an established approach to support and guide such efforts. Using a framework for the design and delivery of value bundles as an analytical lens, this study evaluates the current support of reference models and modeling languages for setting up conceptual models for an integrated design and delivery of value bundles. Consecutively, designing modeling languages and reference models to fit the requirements of conceptual models in product-service systems are presented as upcoming challenges in Service Research. To guide further research, first steps are proposed by exemplarily integrating reference models and modeling languages stemming from the service and manufacturing domains.

Business Process Management is a boundaryspanning discipline that aligns operational capabilities and technology to design and manage business processes. The Digital Transformation has enabled human actors, information systems, and smart products to interact with each other via multiple digital channels. The emergence of this hyper-connected world greatly leverages the prospects of business processes -but also boosts their complexity to a new level. We need to discuss how the BPM discipline can find new ways for identifying, analyzing, designing, implementing, executing, and monitoring business processes. In this research note, selected transformative trends are explored and their impact on current theories and IT artifacts in the BPM discipline is discussed to stimulate transformative thinking and prospective research in this field.

Digital interactions among businesses and consumers through powerful information systems and omnipresent connected devices establish today's networked society. In this light, Service Science continues to take root as a research discipline that focuses on the integration of (digital) resources by service providers and service customers for value co-creation in service systems. Rapid advances in information technology allow for designing novel information systems that enable entirely new configurations of service systems. In turn, Service Science also leaves its mark on the design, adoption, and use of information systems and technology. With this special issue, we compile a set of timely papers that investigate selected facets of the complex interplay between information technology, information systems, and Service Science to design innovative IT artifacts for smart service. This editorial opens this special issue by elaborating on our understanding of smart service.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify strategic options and challenges that arise when an industrial firm moves from providing smart service toward providing a platform.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual study takes on a multidisciplinary research perspective that integrates concepts, theories and insights from service management and marketing, information systems and platform economics.FindingsThe paper outlines three platform types – smart data platform, smart product platform and matching platform – as strategic options for firms that wish to evolve from smart service providers to platform providers.Research limitations/implicationsInvestigating smart service platforms calls for launching interdisciplinary research initiatives. Promising research avenues are outlined to span boundaries that separate different research disciplines today.Practical implicationsManaging a successful transition from providing smart service toward providing a platform requires making significant investments in IT, platform-related capabilities and skills, as well as implement new approaches toward relationship management and brand-building.Originality/valueThe findings described in this paper are valuable to researchers in multiple disciplines seeking to develop and to justify theory related to platforms in industrial scenarios.

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