Customer Roles in Service Supply Chains and Opportunities for Innovation
基于统一服务理论，将服务供应链视为双向供应链，识别出客户在服务供应链中承担的八种角色（如组件供应商、劳动力、设计工程师等），并通过实证研究验证其独特性，进而探讨这些角色如何推动服务供应链创新。
This article conceptualizes service supply chains according to the Unified Service Theory, which defines services as bidirectional supply chains that have customers both providing resources to and receiving resources from service providers. We establish how eight traditional roles in manufacturing supply chains are assumed by customers in service supply chains. Those service–customer roles include component supplier, labor, design engineer, production manager, product, quality assurance, inventory, and competitor. We describe how these eight roles are manifested in both business‐to‐consumer and business‐to‐business service contexts. We confirm the distinctiveness of these eight customer roles through an initial empirical study and show how the roles are manifested across different types of services. We then demonstrate how these distinctive customer roles can form the basis for service supply chain innovation.