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Call for papers

Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing

Special Issue on:
Modularity in business services

Guest editors:

D.Sc. Saara Pekkarinen, (saara.pekkarinen@oulu.fi) and
D.Sc. Pauliina Ulkuniemi1, (pauliina.ulkuniemi@oulu.fi),
University of Oulu, Oulu Business School

Topic of the Special Issue

The importance of business services has remarkably grown in different industries in recent years. Companies focus on their core business and outsource other parts of their operations in order to exploit the external resources of service providers. As a result, service providers are facing demanding markets and are forced to put a lot of effort into developing their service offerings (Menor, Tatikonda, and Sampson, 2002), as well as their own business processes. Modularity could be the solution to finding a balance between customisation (Lampel and Mintzberg, 1996) and the complexity (Araujo and Spring, 2010) of many business services.

The idea of modularity is adopted from the manufacturing of products (Duray, Ward, Milligan, and Berry, 2000). A service module can be composed of one or more service elements or service processes that represent one characteristic of the service (Pekkarinen and Ulkuniemi, 2008). Using modular offerings in service development has two clear benefits: decomposition of the service’s overall structure (Simon, 1962) and interface specifications that define how the different service modules will interact within the service (Sanchez and Collins, 2001).

An important area for future research concerning modularity in services is the role of the customer as a co-producer of the service and value. Modularisation can be used to create new service combinations in customer-provider interfaces together with the customer. Making the customer a co-producer of services gives flexibility to the service provider, but any changes in the roles of the parties in the relationship means changes also in the need and methods of knowledge sharing in the inter-firm context. According to Spring and Araujo (2009), for example, modularity in designing offerings and processes will make services tradable and allow buyers to employ their part of the co-created value. Customer perceived value in a modular service offering also deserves research attention, since we need more research to understand whether, and how, the modular service offering increases the customer’s perception of value.

The Special Issue welcomes all papers that address different aspects of modularity in business services. In addition to their specific contents, all articles should also include managerial implications. Examples of possible topics examined in the Special Issue:

• Service modularity: concept definitions, key dimension, empirical examples and customer interface
• Customer perspective and value: customer role, customer knowledge/insight and value and service co-creation
• New service development and innovations: service design, modular service innovation, network-based architectures, e-business platforms and market modularity
• Management of service operations and relationship: purchasing issues in modular systems, buyer-service provider relationships, services as complex performance, organisational issues in services, information/knowledge transfer and sharing, modular service design and architectures, modular service implementation and business models in modular service business

Submission of papers

Papers submitted must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication in any other journal. Submissions should be approximately 6,000 words in length. Submissions to the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing must be made using the ScholarOne Manuscript Central system. For more details, please visit and consult the author guidelines. A separate title page containing the title, author/s, and contact information for the author(s) must be uploaded. Suitable articles will be subjected to a double-blind review. Hence, authors should not identify themselves in the body of the paper.

Submission deadline of first draft of the paper: 1 May 2010.

References

Araujo, L. and Spring, M. (2010) Complex performance, process modularity and the spatial configuration of production. Forthcoming in: Caldwell, N. and Howard, M. (eds.) Procuring Complex Performance: Studies in Innovation in Product-Service Management, Routledge, London.

Duray, R., Ward, P.T., Milligan, G.W. and Berry, W.L. (2000), Approaches to mass customization: configurations and empirical validation, Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 18, pp. 605-625.

Lampel, J. and Mintzberg, H. (1996), Customizing Customization, Sloan Management Review, Vol. 38, No 1, pp. 21-30.

Menor, L.J., Tatikonda, M.V. and Sampson, S.E. (2002), New service development: areas for exploitation and exploration, Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 135-157.

Pekkarinen, S. and Ulkuniemi, P. (2008), Modularity in developing business services by platform approach, International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 84-103.

Sanchez, R. and Collins, R.P. (2001), Competing and learning – in modular markets. Long Range Planning, Vol. 34, pp. 645-667.

Simon, H.A. (1962), The architecture of complexity, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 6 (December), pp. 467-482.

Spring, M. and Araujo, L. (2009), Service, services and products: rethinking operations strategy. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 444-467.

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