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1. Introduction
The movie Blade Runner 2049 presents a starkly different world, even offering a sci-fi vision of how consumers and companies interact. Consumers move between physical and virtual experiences freely, connected through smart technology to personalized solutions. For example, retail combines bricks with clicks into seamless experiences, where consumers can test products and services on avatars, browse preferred selections aided by artificial intelligence (AI), interrogate logistics channels to find convenient, often personalized solutions and crowd source consumer knowledge in real time. Healthcare involves regulating physical bodily changes through internal monitoring devices, specialist procedures are delivered remotely by AI enabled technicians and robots, including social robots (Wirtz et al., 2018) provide care functions anywhere at any time. Education is focused on individualized learning, with topics developed and accessed in global markets and designed by robots to equip individual students with required knowledge and skills, available on demand, instantly and in any place. While in banking, discrete providers of banking services cease to exist; instead consumer interactions are aggregated across multiple financial providers, with consumers determining, with the aid of blockchain and other technologies, how best to manage their assets and daily financial needs.
As the context of service is disrupted, service scholars have a key role in assisting managers understanding how change in context is relevant to them when planning for the future. Key questions include: how service innovation can offer solutions to emerging problems as well as benefitting from the opportunities created by dynamic contexts; what elements in context change and market trends are keeping mangers awake at night to be prepared for 2050?; and, what is the role of research focusing on service innovation in the future?
Scholars call for conceptual research (MacInnis, 2011), providing theoretical justification for relevant research problems in response to those elements of context that are changing and are impacting service innovations of the future. Of particular importance are frameworks that build on current theoretical foundations and illuminate those elements of context that are most impactful for managing service innovation, by exploring and exploiting opportunities in tandem with future trends. Looking ahead toward 2050, service innovation scholars will be a scarce resource. Yet, service innovation provides a window of research opportunities of a magnitude hard to grasp. To...