Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to enrich the research and practice discourse around service innovation, deepening the role of digitalization capabilities in making organizations sustainable and resilient. Digitalization capabilities are “organizational capabilities that allow firms to pervasively combine digital assets and business resources, and leverage digital networks, to innovate products, services, and processes for organizational learning and customer value creation, and manage innovation for ensuring sustained competitive advantage” (Annarelli et al., 2021:8). A number of researchers have studied the relationship between digitalization, and its related capabilities, with service innovation (Parida et al., 2015), however:

• today, service innovation is even more important, both for the customers and for the organizations; consequently, managers’ extensive interest in ground-breaking ways for handling service innovation is not surprising, as, in seeking to manage service innovation, uncertainty occurs across the following three dimensions: the firm's products, its digital environment, and organizational properties (Nylen and Holmstrom, 2015);
• the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) and Internet-based technologies has been vital, both for the resilience of service-oriented organizations and their sustainability from a social and economic point of view, as well as from an environmental point of view; moreover, advanced digitalization capabilities can provide scope for new functionality, higher reliability, greater efficiency, and increased optimization opportunities that could exponentially increase the value that companies deliver to customers (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014);
• the growing use of individual IT devices in a business context and for service innovation platforms, such as cloud computing, has become both an integral part of internal organizational processes, and they have become a necessity for the management of external environments in service innovation strategies;
• on the one hand, digital capabilities are giving companies a competitive weapon for service innovation; on the other hand, they are completely upsetting their organizational priorities because of the need for continuity/resilience in their business activities; correct cyber security management is necessary to make services resilient and sustainable, and there is a need for introducing and continuously developing a governance of cyber security at all organizational levels, rather than pushing the unaware adoption of high-tech tools and techniques (Annarelli et al., 2020).

This Special Issue welcomes articles that discuss the role of digital capabilities and linked contextual factors as a driver for building and sustainable and resilient organizational systems for service innovation. Topics have to be focused on managerial and organizational aspects, and they may also target company or industry at both a strategic and operational level, given the close interrelation among digital capabilities, service innovation, sustainable and resilient systems, and cybersecurity management. As a consequence, research subjects may concern managerial solutions and strategies by considering policies and practices carried out during best practices’ implementation.

We welcome literature reviews and empirical papers. Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to a rigorous peer review procedure, with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

References

Annarelli A., Battistella C., Nonino F., Parida V. and Pessot E., 2021. Literature review on digitalization capabilities: Co-citation analysis of antecedents, conceptualization and consequences. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 166, paper 120635.

Annarelli A., Nonino F., Palombi G., 2020. Understanding the management of cyber resilient systems. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 149 (2020) 106829

Nylen, D., Holmstrom, J., 2015. Digital innovation strategy: a framework for diagnosing and improving digital product and service innovation. Business Horizon 58 (1), pp. 57–67.

Parida, V., Sjodin, D.R., Lenka, S., Wincent, J., 2015. Developing global service innovation capabilities: how global manufacturers address the challenges of market heterogeneity. Res.-Technol. Manag. 58 (5), 35–44.

Porter, M.E, Heppelmann, J.E., 2014. How smart, connected products are transforming competition. Harvarf Business Review, 92, pp. 11–64.

Dr. Alessandro Annarelli
Dr. Giulia Palombi
Prof. Dr. Fabio Nonino
Guest Editors

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• service innovation
• digitalization capabilities
• sustainable systems
• resilient systems
• cyber security