Practising Value Innovation through Artificial Intelligence: The IBM Watson Case

Abstract

This article focuses on the value innovation prompted by Artificial Intelligence (AI). By shifting the attention from innovation as a new outcome to innovating as something that people do (i.e., a practice) to co-create value, this article addresses how IBM Watson prompts new service provisions and the emergence of new interactions between humans and non-humans. The research allows for detecting how multiple actors connect, interact, learn and discover new ways to do things, serve others better and co-create value through AI. A fresh approach is offered to explore the role of AI to foster networking and knowing practices for value creating and innovating.

Disruptive innovation in a dynamic environment: a winning strategy? An illustration through the analysis of the yoghurt industry in Algeria

“…The phenomenon of "disruption" is not new; the names given to this phenomenon by researchers in the managerial literature vary according to the authors, even though they often use the same examples. The terms "competitive aggressiveness (Aroyeun, Adefulu, & Asikhia, 2018;Linyiru & Ketyenya, 2017;Hughes-Morgan, Kolev, & Macnamara, 2018a), disruptive strategy (Christensen et al, 2018;Dinesh & Sushil, 2019;Dumoulin & Giacomel, 2020;Alsharif, 2019), radical innovation (Flor, Cooper, & Oltra, 2018;Stringer, 2000), strategic innovation (Markides, 1997;Schlegelmilch, Diamantopoulos, & Kreuz, 2003;Varadarajan, 2018), breakout strategy (Jamak, Ali, & Ghazali, 2014;Ulf & Lönnbark, 2013), or even value innovation (Leavy, 2018;Russo-Spena, Mele, & Marzullo, 2019) etc." are the most common and are often used as synonyms.…”

Artificial intelligence (AI) and value co-creation in B2B sales: Activities, actors and resources

“…Their findings suggest that customer reactions to service technology failures vary depending on the degree of anthropomorphism associated with a machine (robotic vs human-like voice), an individual’s sense of power (perceived ability to influence other people in social interactions), and the presence of other customers. Russo-Spena et al (2019) investigate value innovation enabled by AI, using IBM Watson’s cognitive computing application as an illustration and find that AI prompts new service provisions and enables new interactions between humans and non-humans, resulting in value co-creation opportunities.…”

“…• Understanding customers • Other decision making Agrawal and Schorling (1996), Barrow (2016), Hauser et al (2010), Kim (2011) Dzyabura and Hauser (2011) Huang and Rust (2018, Thieme et al (2000) Enabling resource integration between service providers and beneficiaries Fan et al (2016); Glushko and Nomorosa, 2013;van Doorn et al (2017), Russo-Spena et al (2019) Supporting beneficiaries Čaić et al (2018), Knote (2019) understanding of the construct of interest, and let a researcher follow up on initial responses, asking individuals to clarify or elaborate (Brashear et al, 2012). This flexibility allows deeper understanding of the respondent's answers while still providing structure to organize and understand the data and is appropriate for the exploratory nature of the research conducted in this study (Van Esch and Van Esch, 2013).…”

Once upon a time… technology: a fairy tale or a marketing story?

“…Artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies are seen as strong enablers of innovating practices that emerge through the connections of knowledgeable actors (Russo-Spena, Mele, & Marzullo, 2019). Cognitive technologies are the result of deliberate activities that introduce discontinuities (Gherardi, 2012(Gherardi, , 2016, but they are also an emergent phenomenon based on gradually putting into place interactions that link agents, knowledge and artefacts that were previously unconnected or loosely connected, and that are slowly put into a relationship.…”

“…From the perspective of social-material entanglement, humans and cognitive technologies enhance each other's complementary strengths: the leadership, teamwork, creativity and social skills of the former, and the speed, scalability and quantitative dynamic capabilities of the latter. New practices convey the social waves of new technologies in terms of the new value co-creation opportunities (Russo-Spena et al, 2019). In such a perspective, the challenge is that of multiplying experiential opportunities and promoting value co-creation that has no limits in time, space and content (Polese, Mele, Gummesson, 2017).…”