Bridging the gap between technical and human elements in digital service innovation

Creating and establishing a successful innovation is challenging and many attempts fail. Despite of the complex nature of the phenomenon, previous literature often tends to limit its focus on either to the technical elements or human elements related to an innovation. Current research-in-progress paper aims to avoid this ‘either-or’ thinking and rather examine the roles, impact and mutual interaction of both, technical and human elements, in order to further understand the successful emergence of a digital service innovation, i.e. a novel value co-creation practice enabled by a digital infrastructure. To achieve this we draw from three separate fields: service ecosystem perspective, information technology (IT) perspective and actor-network theory. The paper presents a plan for future empirical study and provides initial description of a case study about establishing a digital shopping solution in a small brick and mortar convenience store in Northern Finland.