Modelling Service Systems for Collaborative Innovation in the Enterprise Software Industry - The St. Gallen Media Reference Model Applied

As organizational structures shift from centralized and hierarchical structures to decentralized and loosely coupled networks, value creation and innovation processes are changing as well. Especially in the services sector, we observe a shift from closed and company-internal innovation processes to more open and collaborative forms of innovation (e.g. via various types of communities that emerge in enterprises´ surrounding ecosystems). Communities of co-innovation or innovation networks can be described from a service systems perspective. In this work, a modelling approach to generally describe service systems is developed leveraging the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM). A specific instantiation of this model is presented that allows for modelling service systems in terms of communities of co-innovation. The model is applied for the case of co-innovation in the enterprise software ecosystem of the SAP AG. The approach fosters understanding, organizing and managing such new networks of collaborative innovation in service science.