An actor-centric lens on service ecosystem: value cocreation through a codification process

The complex interplay within service ecosystems can constrain actors’ opportunities to cocreate value. We use emergence and institutionalization to analyze service ecosystems and identify four spheres arising from their interplay: self-initiating, self-confounding, self-challenging, and self-evident. By introducing the Actor’s Codification of Ecosystem (ACE) framework, which adopts an actor-centric lens, we explain how actors codify ecosystem complexity through their situated competences, experiences, roles, and institutional exposure. We demonstrate that value cocreation depends on actors’ partial alignment of these codifications. Furthermore, the study extends institutional work by adding hacking to the established categories of making, maintaining, and breaking institutions. Through institutional work, actors may expand predictable and actionable spheres of influence, although such codification remains fragile amid changing conditions. For managers, ACE framework clarifies how value-cocreation opportunities emerge, evolve, and may be shaped.