Exploring innovation within a complex service ecosystem: the multiple dynamics leading to insurance innovation

The ecosystem focal has been a growing tool to observe and understand how firm co-create value, and represent an emerging and discussed paradigm (Kapoor, 2018). The question of the value creation also lead to the concept of innovation ecosystems. They are supposed to create extra value by combining knowledge, understanding and value proposition from their actors. In the same time, in spite of the recognition of different types of innovation—product, process, market, input, and organizational (Schumpeter 1934), services have long time been overlooked by research. Since, services became a significant part of economies, shedding light to service innovation (Gallouj & Weinstein, 1997; Miles, 1993). Service innovation is now a key of differentiation in a competitive context (Helkkula et al., 2018) including in manufacturing firms (Zheng et al., 2018). Based on a case study, this contribution adopts the ecosystem perspective to highlight the specificities of innovation in insurance as a service. Although scholars are unanimous in their belief that ecosystems are increasingly relevant to explaining organizational outcome, systemic, ecosystem-level perspectives are rarely applied (Lütjen et al., 2019). Considering insurance service as the fruit of a complex service ecosystem, this article offers a unique point of view that contributes to a better understanding of service innovation within its innovation ecosystem. Our results show that informal relationships then create coopetitive dynamic which is materialized by an ambivalent attitude in innovation projects in this ecosystem, projects leading to competitive advantage causes a highly competitive behaviour, where low competitive advantage fosters cooperative behaviour. Those results contributes to both service innovation and coopetition fields and suggest a better coopetition management to take full advantage of it.