Irene Ng

Irene Ng, Gerard Briscoe

While service-dominant logic proposes that all "Goods are a distribution mechanism for service provision" (FP3), there is a need to understand when and why a firm would utilise direct or indirect (goods) service provision, and the interactions between them, to co-create value with the customer. Three longitudinal case studies in B2B equipment-based 'complex service' systems were analysed to gain an understanding of customers' co-creation activities to achieve outcomes. We found the nature of value, degree of contextual variety and the firm's legacy viability to be viability threats. To counter this, the firm uses (a) Direct Service Provision for Scalability and Replicability, (b) Indirect Service Provision for variety absorption and co-creating emotional value and customer experience and (c) designing direct and indirect provision for Scalability and Absorptive Resources of the customer. The co-creation of complex multidimensional value could be delivered through different value propositions of the firm. The research proposes a value-centric way of understanding the interactions between direct and indirect service provision in the design of the firm's value proposition and proposes a viable systems approach towards reorganising the firm. The study provides a way for managers to understand the effectiveness (rather than efficiency) of the firm in co-creating value as a major issue in the design of complex socio-technical systems. Goods are often designed within the domain of engineering and product design, often placing human activity as a supporting role to the equipment. Through an SDLogic lens, this study considers the design of both equipment and human activity on an equal footing for value co-creation with the customer, and it yielded interesting results on when direct provisioning (goods) should be redesigned, considering all activities equally.

Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Ellis Solaiman et al.

Recently, decentralised (on-blockchain) platforms have emerged to complement centralised (off-blockchain) platforms for the implementation of automated, digital (smart) contracts. However, neither alternative can individually satisfy the requirements of a large class of applications. On-blockchain platforms suffer from scalability, performance, transaction costs and other limitations. Off-blockchain platforms are afflicted by drawbacks due to their dependence on single trusted third parties. We argue that in several application areas, hybrid platforms composed from the integration of on- and off-blockchain platforms are more able to support smart contracts that deliver the desired quality of service (QoS). Hybrid architectures are largely unexplored. To help cover the gap, in this paper we discuss the implementation of smart contracts on hybrid architectures. As a proof of concept, we show how a smart contract can be split and executed partially on an off-blockchain contract compliance checker and partially on the Rinkeby Ethereum network. To test the solution, we expose it to sequences of contractual operations generated mechanically by a contract validator tool.

Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Ellis Solaiman, Ioannis Sfyrakis et al.

In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enforce contractual rights, obligations and prohibitions at run time. We explain that emerging blockchain technology is certainly a promising platform for implementing smart contracts but argue that there is a large class of applications, where blockchain is inadequate due to performance, scalability, and consistency requirements, and also due to language expressiveness and cost issues that are hard to solve. We explain that in some situations a centralised approach that does not rely on blockchain is a better alternative due to its simplicity, scalability, and performance. We suggest that in applications where decentralisation and transparency are essential, developers can advantageously combine the two approaches into hybrid solutions where some operations are enforced by enforcers deployed on--blockchains and the rest by enforcers deployed on trusted third parties.