Employees’ acceptance and resistance of new technology and social structure are frequently examined in Information Systems research. Resistance is expressed in various forms, including a lack of cooperation, workarounds, and physical sabotage. Workarounds, in particular, have a dual nature and can refer to both, undesirable behavior that contradicts organizational struc-ture and to desired organizational innovation. While antecedents and different forms of worka-rounds have been explored, literature has remained silent on how and why workarounds of an individual employee can affect activities performed by other employees and thereby, change work routines on an organizational level. Since employees’ day-to-day performances constitute the ostensive patterns of a routine, we argue that workarounds will not only impact performanc-es of adjacent routines, but also transform the organization as a social structure. With a prelim-inary set of qualitative data from 24 interviews, we used a multiple case study design to concep-tualize six patterns that illustrate how and why workarounds can spread through an organiza-tion. The patterns are systematized by a framework that considers three types of collaboration and two types of handoffs across routines. This first evidence points at the nature of complex desired and undesired consequences that can emerge through workarounds performed in an organization.

Increased interconnectedness of multiple actors and digital resources in service eco-systems offer new opportunities for service innovation. In digitally transforming eco-systems, organizations need to explore and exploit innovation simultaneously, which is defined as ambidexterity. However, research on ambidextrous service innovation is scarce. We provide a systematic literature review based on the concepts of ambidexterity, offering two contributions. First, research strands are disconnected, emphasizing either exploration or exploitation of service innovation, despite an organizations’ need to accelerate innovation cycles of exploring and exploiting services. Second, a new framework for ambidextrous service innovation is provided, inspired by the dynamism and generative mechanisms of the ontologically related concept of organizational routines. The framework adopts the perspective of a mutually constitutive relationship between exploring new and exploiting current resources, activities, and knowledge. The findings remedy the scattered literature through a coherent perspective on service innovation that responds to organizations’ needs and guides future research.

Although many methods have been proposed for engineering services and customer solutions, most of these approaches give little consideration to recombinant service innovation. In an age of smart products and smart data, we can, however, expect that many of future service innovations need to be based on adding, transferring, dissociating, and associating existing value propositions. The purpose of this paper is to outline what properties constitute recombinant service innovation and to identify if current service engineering approaches fulfill these properties. Based on a conceptual in-depth analysis of 24 service engineering methods, we identify that most methods focus on designing value propositions instead of service systems, view service independent of physical goods, are linear or iterative, and incompletely address the mechanisms of recombinant innovation. We discuss how these deficiencies can be remedied and propose a first conceptual model of a revised se rvice system engineering approach.