Service Ecosystem: Theory, Technologies and Use Cases

Abstract

The service’s industrialization hatched many researches. It even calls for new disciplines, namely, product-service system, service engineering, service enterprise and service science. These extensive research spectrums use the term Service Ecosystem in different contexts, though there is barely any literature addressing this notion. Further, the emerging Internet technology provides extra facets to the Service Ecosystem. It enables a complex online collaboration that hosts new possibilities and challenges. The recent Internet technology allows the effortless selling and consuming of digital goods. Ironically, in the era of service dominance, we are still not able to do the same with a service product, even though services account for 63.2% of economic value on average of the world GDP. It is anticipated that soon services will become digitally commercialized. The Internet will enable service agents to collaborate in producing value-added services and innovation, i.e., The Internet of Services (IoS). The ecosystem’s diversity raises a communication issue, thus increasing the transaction cost, at a time when the industry needs to compensate for such cost. Therefore, one cannot overlook the advent of a Service Ecosystem in the current fast-paced service economy. How well the actors can adapt and co-evolve in the information-intense service economy will determine their performance in the ecosystem. Subsequently, there are two preliminary issues demanding an answer. First, the notion of Service Ecosystem needs to be understood objectively and uniformly. Second, the current approaches used to overcome the challenges need to be supported. Therefore, an extensive literature research and qualitative analysis as well as study cases were conducted in this thesis. The results of the work are the proposal of a Service Ecosystem theory, validation of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL), and five scenarios applying USDL in the Smart City vision. The substantial notion of Service Ecosystem provides an objective understanding and clarity that can be used in the lateral researches. Subsequently, the positive result of USDL validation as a dialectal mean for IoS will ripen the enabling technologies. Lastly, the five concepts concerning traffic and education problems in Jakarta encourage the broader public to create innovative or practicable use cases. Thus, it may help to amplify the network effect of USDL, expedite its standardization process and accelerate the maturity of the Service Ecosystem.