How Smartness Enables Value Co-Creation: An Explorative Study of Italian Fashion Retail.

Digital revolution has involved and changed many service industries and also retailing, renewing its inbound and outbound processes. The pervasiveness of the internet of things has boosted the rise and growth of digital platforms, exploiting consumers' potential in personalizing their shopping experience, according to their wants and needs. Digital platforms have triggered the transition from a traditional two-sided marketplace towards a dynamic and complex one. The smart mindset, which has pervaded retail service domain, is in line with the current service research, according to which the dematerialization of value exchanges implies a new approach to the traditional service delivery. Therefore, this chapter aims at investigating the way retailers manage digital tools. Embracing the framework of S-D logic, the analysis shapes the role that the digital technologies have in digital process reconfiguration as well as in the shaping of specific context or platform able to boost the emergence of retail service innovation. A multiple case study has been performed.