Production, innovation and service networks: complex interplay, evolution and coordination

Production, innovation and service networks of companies all over the world become increasingly decentralised, specialised and interdependent. These three characteristics combined inevitably lead to the formation of complex configurations of resources, 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 gaps between these networks mean that coordinating them and managing their interfaces in a global operations context are becoming strategically important. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue and to develop a number of propositions about the development and organisation of these networks. The paper highlights the critical importance of engineering operations in this process. The propositions are developed by employing the design science approach based on a literature study and industrial co-development workshops with 12 Danish industrial companies. The paper closes with suggestions for how the tentative results of this work can be unravelled further by extending its empirical base.