Production, Innovation and Service Networks: Complex Interplay and Coordination

Production, innovation and service networks of companies all over the world become increasingly decentralized, specialized and interdependent. The three characteristics combined inevitably lead to the formation of complex configurations of assets and capabilities crossing both national and organisational borders. The existing studies do not adequately address the complex interplay between co-evolving production, innovation and service networks. The widening geographical and cognitive gap between these networks means that coordinating them and managing their interfaces in global operations context is becoming strategically important. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue and to develop a number of propositions about how companies can organize these networks and coordinate between them effectively. The propositions are developed by employing the design science approach based on a literature study and industrial co-development workshops with twelve Danish industrial companies. The paper closes with suggestions for how the tentative results of this work can be unraveled further by extending its empirical base to the cases of Chinese companies