What is it about?
This article calls for a service ecosystems perspective for public policy analysis and design because this perspective considers the collective, multi-actor and systemic phenomenon of value co-creation activities. By adopting a service ecosystems perspective, policy makers can use a multi-level anlysis to identify and evaluate various problem-condition-solution combinations which is fundamental to addressing public problems.
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Why is it important?
In the public sector, actors (e.g., consumers, end-users, citizens, firms) to not engage in dyadic exchanges but co-create value by integrating resources from many different sources. As a consequence, policy makers must gain an understanding of the entire value constellation, including how individual users and the collective citizenry co-create value in their specific use contexts. This understanding sets the starting point for policy design, which in contrast to top-down policy making should involve the identification and support of emergent solutions driven by different actors.
Perspectives
Public policy making predominantly focuses on dyadic exchanges and does not consider the dynamism and complexity of public problems. The result are costly policy failures and the inefficient application of increasingly constrained public resources. In search for an alternative perspective, we show that a service ecosystems lens can provide a suitable theoretical basis for public policy analysis and design because it facilitates a multi-level analysis which considers the users’ value creation process (micro level) to be embedded in context (meso level) and a broader value constellation (macro level). This multi-level analysis sets the starting point for identifying and supporting emergent solutions driven by different actors. In addition, policy makers can evaluate policies in terms of different problem-conditions-solution combinations across the value constellation, and the effect of public interventions on these constellations.
Jakob Trischler
Karlstads Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Application of a Service Ecosystems Lens to Public Policy Analysis and Design: Exploring the Frontiers, Journal of Marketing & Public Policy, December 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0743915618818566.
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