Actor Engagement in Service Ecosystems: Innovating Value Co-Creation in Food Retail

The actor engagement concept highlights the reciprocal, social, and collective nature of engagement, aimed at enhancing value co-creation processes in service ecosystems. This chapter explores the evolution of the service ecosystem in retailing contexts, with the development of new retail formulas derived from the effective interaction between corporate stances and engaged actors, in particular customers, social movements, and suppliers. In the analysis, the authors focus on two interlinked cases: Eataly, a new venture that emerged from a mutual organizational commitment between corporate power and the Slow Food social movement; FICO-Eataly World, the subsequent evolution of Eataly, which derived from the reshaping of the service ecosystem due to increasing supplier engagement in the retail format. Eataly and FICO represent interesting settings to better understand how forms of resource integration can occur, how and to what extent the community and corporate stances mutually adjust during the value co-creation process, and how a service ecosystem can evolve as a result of actor engagement.