Bridging the Service Divide Through Digitally Enabled Service Innovations: Evidence from Indian Healthcare Service Providers
Authors: Srivastava, Shirish C.; Shainesh, G.
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2015)
DOI: 10.25300/misq/2015/39.1.11
The digital divide is usually conceptualized through goods-dominant logic, where bridging the divide entails providing digital goods to disadvantaged segments of the population. This is expected to enhance their digital capabilities and thus to have a positive influence on the digital outcomes (or services) experienced. In contrast, this study is anchored in an alternative service-dominant logic and posits that viewing the divide from a service perspective might be better suited to the context of developing countries, where there is a huge divide across societal segments in accessing basic services such as healthcare and education. This research views the prevailing differences in the level of services consumed by different population segments (service divide) as the key issue to be addressed by innovative digital tools in developing countries. The study posits that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be leveraged to bridge the service divide to enhance the capabilities of service-disadvantaged segments of society. But such service delivery requires an innovative assembly of ICT as well as non-ICT resources. Building on concepts from service-dominant logic and se…