How firms configure and deploy innovation platforms to foster service innovations Bård Tronvoll Inland Norway University of Applied Science & Karlstad University bard@tronvoll.no Abstract Service innovation research has extended the study of service ecosystems to embrace the role of platforms, thus creating a sustainable advantage in competitive markets. Making creative and effective use of innovation platforms requires a better understanding of how key actors foster service innovation by engaging with multiple actors, understanding dynamic structures and managing the innovation process. This article explains how firms configure and use innovation platforms to foster service innovations. Drawing on agency-driven and structure-driven concepts, the framework developed in this paper, links the innovation platform to renew ongoing business. Constituted by shared structures, including norms, standards, and rules together with value co-creation logics, the innovation platform functions as the institutionalized site focused on innovative resource integration and value co-creation processes. The usefulness of the framework is shown by describing how six firms use three categories of a platform to pursue innovation. 1. Introduction Businesses are dependent on innovations to survive and strengthen competitive advantage [1]. By explaining how firms manage to remain innovative, the paper argues that firms often use innovation platforms to renew their business. The innovation platform’s most important function is to orchestrate collaboration among multiple actors using technologies and a wide range of resources, configured to foster service innovations. By facilitating access to and use of appropriate resources, an innovation platform enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of service exchange and so becomes a venue for innovation [2]. Industry logic and contexts enable the use of innovation platforms such as SellaBand in the music business, Kapipal in non-profit services and Ericsson HypeLabs in IoT technology. Traditionally, innovation processes have been viewed as a pipeline process where value is created by controlling a linear series of activities transforming the resources into outcomes that gain higher value for individual actors. If viewing innovation as a platform, Bo Edvardsson Inland Norway University of Applied Science & Karlstad University bo.edvardsson@kau.se value is co-created in collaboration among multiple actors joining forces and integrate resources to enhance value in the business contexts. The core of using a platform view is to manage a shift from controlling to orchestrating innovations, from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions, and from increasing customer value to secure the viability of the ecosystem [3]. Thus, the platform view of innovation widens the scope beyond individual innovations to facilitate a series of innovation efforts. Service innovation has grown to become a rich and dynamic field, marked by novel approaches. One of these approaches emphasizes the recombination of existing actors and resources in service ecosystems [e.g. 4]. Thus, Edvardsson and Tronvoll [5] extended this understanding to include structures such as institutional arrangements. This conceptual article aims to explain how firms configure and deploy innovation platforms to foster service innovations. The structuration of innovation framework developed by Edvardsson, Tronvoll and Witell (forthcoming), built on agency- and structure-driven concepts emphasize that engaged actors act purposefully to facilitate the upscaling of service innovation to explain how different types of innovation platforms are used to foster service innovations. The article contributes to the understanding of how innovation platforms are used to orchestrate collaboration among multiple actors to achieve service innovations that renew the business. The proposed framework explains how firms become innovative over time by showing how an innovation platform fosters multiple service innovations. The remainder of the article is structured as follows. Following a description of the structuration of service innovation framework and its key concepts, we analyze service ecosystem platforms that have enabled six different firms to develop and upscale innovations. Next, we describe how service innovations are enabled or inhibited by innovation platforms, and conclude by outlining managerial implications and areas for further research. Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2020 Page 1608 URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/63937 978-0-9981331-3-3 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)