Value Creation through Co-Opetitionin Service Networks

Once serving the whole value chain by what has become known as vertical integration,companies have long since started to outsource value creation processesto specialized partners. Moreover, societal changes have induced a paradigm shiftfrom product-driven to service-dominated value creation. Capabilities of informationtechnology lets both of these developments take a new dimension. Well-definedinterfaces and standardization as fundamental concepts of service orientation bringabout a high degree of interoperability, which enables companies to establish multiplelinkages and to combine capabilities and assets from diverse parties. Significantbusiness impact of such tendencies can be observed in the software industry.Already shaken by the fundamental transition from selling traditional softwareproducts to the provisioning of on-demand services, a second wave of innovationincludes the specialization and modularization of services, giving way to complexservices composed of modules offered by diversified providers. Coordination ofparticipants takes place in highly agile and modular service value networks (SVNs)that exploit the power of combinatorics credited to Web services: they allow fora flexible recombination of service modules to meet heterogeneous customer demands.These newly arising networks include both cooperation and competition as inherentbuilding blocks. On the one hand, a certain set of service providers mustcooperate in order to create value. On the other hand, substitutive services competeto be included in complex offerings. What is more, partners turn into rivalswhen it comes to distributing a jointly created surplus which cannot be precisely accreditedto the contributors. While the technological side to enabling SVNs alreadyenjoys intensified research activity, economic considerations that include both theco-opetitive environment and the characteristics of (complex) services are laggingbehind.This thesis tackles the challenge of coordinating self-interested, yet partly interdependentservice providers