How Digital Artifacts Enable Mutual Affordances in Service Ecosystems: Evidence from Smart Service Systems (Doctoral Consortium)

The trends of digitalization and servitization require today’s organizations to collaborate closely in all stages of innovation and operation. This results in multilateral actor networks defined by resource integration and service exchange– so-called service ecosystems. Actors in the ecosystem typically use service platforms to handle the resulting complexity and facilitate service exchange.
The proposed research endeavor analyzes how IT artifacts can act as such service platforms and enable mutual affordances in service ecosystems. In doing so, we explore a novel way of applying affordance theory in IS research and contribute to digital innovation management. This article presents a basic conceptual framework and discusses the planned research design of an upcoming dissertation project. Further, we share preliminary insights of applying the theoretical approach in the context of smart service systems.