Welfare Service Innovation Network

This work-in-progress paper presents a service innovation process of a welfare service network developed to offer a new kind of service infrastructure especially to elderly people and to people with disabilities. The paper presents the particular service development process by building on a four-stage model by Edvardsson, Gustafsson, Johnson and Sabdén (2002). Each stage, incorporating the elements of the ARA-model of the IMP Group (Actors, Resources and Activities), is then discussed in- depth and connected with empirical evidence from a case study with the company that has developed the actual service system. The service innovation process described in the paper illustrates the multidimensional nature of the development process, where the service development stages overlap with one another and progress simultaneously and where some actors play a different role during different phases of the project. Although the Edvardsson et al. (2002) model offers a valuable tool to summarise the various resources, actors and activities in different stages of the innovation process, it does not provide the required flexibility to explain the interconnectedness of the various network actors in different stages of the development continuum from idea generation to service implementation. The paper concludes with the notion that in order to understand the plurality of simultaneous development processes and the development networks within networks, more research needs to be carried out with the decision-makers of the network member organisations and other actors in the innovation process.