Ambidexterity in Service Innovation Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Increased interconnectedness of multiple actors and digital resources in service eco-systems offer new opportunities for service innovation. In digitally transforming eco-systems, organizations need to explore and exploit innovation simultaneously, which is defined as ambidexterity. However, research on ambidextrous service innovation is scarce. We provide a systematic literature review based on the concepts of ambidexterity, offering two contributions. First, research strands are disconnected, emphasizing either exploration or exploitation of service innovation, despite an organizations’ need to accelerate innovation cycles of exploring and exploiting services. Second, a new framework for ambidextrous service innovation is provided, inspired by the dynamism and generative mechanisms of the ontologically related concept of organizational routines. The framework adopts the perspective of a mutually constitutive relationship between exploring new and exploiting current resources, activities, and knowledge. The findings remedy the scattered literature through a coherent perspective on service innovation that responds to organizations’ needs and guides future research

Lumping of Degree-Based Mean Field and Pair Approximation Equations for Multi-State Contact Processes

Contact processes form a large and highly interesting class of dynamic processes on networks, including epidemic and information spreading. While devising stochastic models of such processes is relatively easy, analyzing them is very challenging from a computational point of view, particularly for large networks appearing in real applications. One strategy to reduce the complexity of their analysis is to rely on approximations, often in terms of a set of differential equations capturing the evolution of a random node, distinguishing nodes with different topological contexts (i.e., different degrees of different neighborhoods), like degree-based mean field (DBMF), approximate master equation (AME), or pair approximation (PA). The number of differential equations so obtained is typically proportional to the maximum degree kmax of the network, which is much smaller than the size of the master equation of the underlying stochastic model, yet numerically solving these equations can still be problematic for large kmax. In this paper, we extend AME and PA, which has been proposed only for the binary state case, to a multi-state setting and provide an aggregation procedure that clusters together nodes having similar degrees, treating those in the same cluster as indistinguishable, thus reducing the number of equations while preserving an accurate description of global observables of interest. We also provide an automatic way to build such equations and to identify a small number of degree clusters that give accurate results. The method is tested on several case studies, where it shows a high level of compression and a reduction of computational time of several orders of magnitude for large networks, with minimal loss in accuracy.Comment: 16 pages with the Appendi

Bounding the Equilibrium Distribution of Markov Population Models

Arguing about the equilibrium distribution of continuous-time Markov chains can be vital for showing properties about the underlying systems. For example in biological systems, bistability of a chemical reaction network can hint at its function as a biological switch. Unfortunately, the state space of these systems is infinite in most cases, preventing the use of traditional steady state solution techniques. In this paper we develop a new approach to tackle this problem by first retrieving geometric bounds enclosing a major part of the steady state probability mass, followed by a more detailed analysis revealing state-wise bounds.Comment: 4 page