Service Value Networks: Humans Hypernetwork to Cocreate Value

Service is about value cocreation between customers and providers. Cocreation builds on human networking: people connecting fluidly with each other as customers, providers, and resources to pursue common values. This paper develops a new analysis of service value networks, building on a previously presented hypernetwork model to study how people can scale their value cocreation up to span the entire population (domain), down to meet individual needs, and transformationally to breed new business designs. The new analysis reflects the convergence of social networks and e-commerce, and the evolution of physical products toward incorporating services to users into them (such as the apps and digital resources on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad). The hypernetwork model analyzes human networks that overlay multidimensionally, such as the Internet community itself. These properties extend the previous research results on random graphs and semiregular networks. A simulation study helps verify the hypernetworking analysis.