The Smart Home: How Consumers Craft New Service Networks by Combining Heterogeneous Smart Domestic Products

Abstract

Service research suggests homes are becoming increasingly connected as consumers automate and personalize new forms of service provision. Yet, large-scale empirical evidence on how and why consumers automate smart domestic products (SDPs) is lacking. To address this knowledge gap, we analyze 13,905 consumer-crafted, automated combinations of SDPs, totaling 1,144,094 installations, across 253 separate service providers on the web service IFTTT.com . An exploratory network analysis examines the topology of the network and an interpretive coding exercise reveals how consumers craft different styles of human-computer interaction to cocreate value. The results reveal that the SDP network is disassortative, is imbalanced, has a long-tailed degree distribution, and that popular services have high centrality across all product category combinations. We show that popular combinations of SDPs are primarily motivated by utilitarian value-seeking enacted through a preference for automated tasks outside of conscious attention, though more individualistic combinations are slightly more likely to be hedonistically inclined. We conclude by showing how these consumer-crafted forms of service provision within domestic environments reveal design redundancy and opportunities for service innovation.

Mapping the landscape of Consumer Food Waste

“…and Local Environment, each of which achieved especially high co-citation scores relative to their overall citations. The long-tailed nature of both the citation and co-citation distributions are similar to other social and technological networks (Albert and Barabási, 2002;Harvey et al, 2020). What stands out, however, is the recent rapid growth in this area of research in the past 5 years.…”

Pathways to Service System Smartness for Firms

“…The smartness of service systems can vary considerably (Harvey et al 2020;Langley et al 2021;Pardo, Ivens, and Pagani 2020). Research by Henkens, Verleye, and Larivière (2021) concluded that smartness varies along four critical characteristics, which we apply to the smart watch example:…”

“…As firms pursue smartness in various ways, different configurations of smartness emerge, which refer to managerial decisions on manipulating the four characteristics. Several studies have demonstrated how customers engage or disengage with smart products with varying levels of smartness (e.g., Chouk and Mani 2019;Harvey et al 2020;Henkens, Verleye, and Larivière 2021). Nonetheless, it has long been recognized that smart products are also reshaping how firms design service systems (Allmendinger and Lombreglia 2005;Porter and Heppelman 2014).…”

“…The benefits include convenience, self-efficacy, and performance excellence, among others (e.g., De Keyser et al 2019;Huang and Rust 2018;Wirtz et al 2018). Besides these utilitarian benefits, Harvey et al (2020) also point to the importance of hedonic and transformative benefits when customers craft their smart home. Notably, these benefits can also relate to mitigating risks, such as loss of control and privacy and increased complexity (e.g., Chouk and Mani 2019;Rijsdijk and Hultink 2009;Wünderlich, Wangenheim, and Bitner 2013).…”

“…Indeed, as stated by Blocker, Davis, and Anderson (2022), firms seem to anticipate unintended and harmful consequences of service system smartness, thereby urging them to communicate about how their smart service system contributes to well-being. As such, firms can help customers to improve their well-being when crafting or connecting different smart service systems, such as in a smart home (Harvey et al 2020).…”