Submitted Abstract
In the digital age, business environments are in a constant flux of change such that the notion of competitive advantage becomes fleeting and unsustainable for organizations. Firms need agile dynamic capabilities to continually innovate their businesses, to survive and thrive, so as to respond to or to reshape the changing environments. Such business innovation excellence requires firms to simultaneously excel in service innovation, business model innovation and business ecosystems redesign – three closely interrelated practices. To date, however, these practices have been treated, by extant literature and practitioners, individually and separately as if they were independent practices. There is scarcity of knowledge as to how these three aspects of business innovation can be designed, implemented and managed integratively, holistically and coherently. The proposed research activities, aim to contribute to filling that knowledge gap. More specifically, we aim to synthesise an integrative design framework for business innovation – one that allows managers to simultaneously and coherently account for the conceptual and practical interrelationships of service innovation, business model and business ecosystem designs to attain optimal stakeholder value co-creation, in pursuit of the requisite agile dynamic capability to maintain evolutionary fitness with the uncertain external business environments.The design science research method will be used to structure the research activities. The integrative framework and methodology for value co-creating business innovation is first synthesised conceptually from the extant theories of strategic management, service science, business model, and business ecosystem, and then refined and validated empirically via it-erative field applications by selected industry partners (e.g. Luxembourg Post Telecom). A first theoretical integrative framework (Chew, 2013b) has already been published by the visiting researcher as a peer-reviewed initial input to this research. Collaboration with CRP Henri Tudor by the researcher is in progress (2014) to conduct preliminary study of partner Luxembourg firms. In the next step (2015-18), this framework will be refined, extended and validated through knowledge transfer to and field application by the industry partner(s) to their business following the interpretive qualitative research protocol. The partner’s business innovation capabilities – as an agile dynamic capability – will be assessed against and enhanced through embracing the resultant integrative business innovation practices via semi-structured interviews, structured workshops and iterative double-loop learning from field application.The research will shed new light on the integrative practices of business innovation. The out-comes include the industry partner’s enhanced business innovation capabilities – agile dynamic capability – measured by innovation outputs resulted from skilful application of the resultant (new) integrative business innovation framework; joint publication in A-rank journals; and establishment of a long-term research partnership programme between CRP Henri Tudor and UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) in Australia.