The smart home: how consumers craft new service networks by combining heterogeneous smart domestic products

Harvey, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4911-6189, Poorrezaei, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0725-3209, Woodall, T ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8949-5577, Avram-Nica, G, Smith, G, Ajiboye, T, Kholodova, K and Zhu, K, 2020. The smart home: how consumers craft new service networks by combining heterogeneous smart domestic products. Journal of Service Research, 23 (4), pp. 504-526. ISSN 1094-6705

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Abstract

Service research suggests homes are becoming increasingly connected as consumers automate and personalize new forms of service provision. Yet large-scale empirical evidence on how and why consumers automate smart domestic products is lacking. To address this knowledge gap we analyze 13,905 consumer-crafted, automated combinations of smart domestic products, totaling 1,144,094 installations, across 253 separate service providers on the Web service IFTTT.com. An exploratory network analysis examines the topology of the network and an interpretive coding exercise reveals how consumers craft different styles of human-computer interaction to co-create value. The results reveal the smart domestic product network is disassortative, imbalanced, has a long-tailed degree distribution, and that popular services have high centrality across all product category combinations. We show that popular combinations of smart domestic products are primarily motivated by utilitarian value seeking enacted through a preference for automated tasks outside of conscious attention, though more individualistic combinations are slightly more likely to be hedonistically inclined. We conclude by showing how these consumer-crafted forms of service provision within domestic environments reveal design redundancy and opportunities for service innovation.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Service Research
Creators:	Harvey, J., Poorrezaei, M., Woodall, T., Avram-Nica, G., Smith, G., Ajiboye, T., Kholodova, K. and Zhu, K.
Publisher:	Sage
Date:	November 2020
Volume:	23
Number:	4
ISSN:	1094-6705
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/1094670520929095 DOI 1323017 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2020. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	05 May 2020 11:17
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:13
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/39786

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