Strategic Relationships
Strategic relationships between entities shape the nature of collaboration and competition, as well as the competition for collaborators in markets - customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and others (Spohrer, Kwan, & Fisk, 2014). Rethinking strategic relationships from a service science perspective is the focus of this chapter. The rise of the collaborative, sharing, or more accurately, platform-enabled person-to-person value co-creation economy has increased the dynamic nature of markets across diverse industries and regional jurisdictions. Within the service science literature, “service” is defined as value co-creation interactions and outcomes between entities, all happening over time, space, and scale as part of the evolving ecology of nested, networked service system entities (Spohrer & Maglio, 2010). In this chapter, three types of service system entities are compared and contrasted from the perspective of strategic relationships: businesses, nations, and NFL sport teams.