Exploring innovation within a complex service ecosystem: the multiple dynamics leading to insurance innovation
Abstract
The ecosystem focal has been a growing tool to observe and understand how firm co-create
value, and represent an emerging and discussed paradigm (Kapoor, 2018). The question of the
value creation also lead to the concept of innovation ecosystems. They are supposed to create
extra value by combining knowledge, understanding and value proposition from their actors. In
the same time, in spite of the recognition of different types of innovation—product, process,
market, input, and organizational (Schumpeter 1934), services have long time been overlooked
by research. Since, services became a significant part of economies, shedding light to service
innovation (Gallouj & Weinstein, 1997; Miles, 1993). Service innovation is now a key of
differentiation in a competitive context (Helkkula et al., 2018) including in manufacturing firms
(Zheng et al., 2018).
Based on a case study, this contribution adopts the ecosystem perspective to highlight the
specificities of innovation in insurance as a service. Although scholars are unanimous in their
belief that ecosystems are increasingly relevant to explaining organizational outcome, systemic,
ecosystem-level perspectives are rarely applied (Lütjen et al., 2019). Considering insurance
service as the fruit of a complex service ecosystem, this article offers a unique point of view
that contributes to a better understanding of service innovation within its innovation ecosystem.
Our results show that informal relationships then create coopetitive dynamic which is
materialized by an ambivalent attitude in innovation projects in this ecosystem, projects leading
to competitive advantage causes a highly competitive behaviour, where low competitive
advantage fosters cooperative behaviour. Those results contributes to both service innovation
and coopetition fields and suggest a better coopetition management to take full advantage of it.