ECRA Guest Editors' Introduction for Volume 10, Issue 1, January-February 2011, Special Section: Service Innovation in E-Commerce

This special section includes two papers selected from the Eleventh International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC 2009), held in Taipei, Taiwan during August 2009. ICEC 2009 focused on the theme of service innovation in e-commerce, and the conference attracted paper submissions on various topics related to Web mining, service innovation, mobile commerce, security, trust, and other issues. The Internet has become the infrastructure of choice for many different kinds of transactions, and the study of service innovation is a leading new direction for e-commerce research. Service innovation involves the fulfillment of value propositions related to the provision and consumption of services. Several aspects of service innovation prompt us to think about whether there might be a new paradigm for research related to e-commerce. First, services in e-commerce are typically offered via service systems in which resources are mobilized based on the relationship and interaction among players in value networks. Second, service systems usually are composed of business entities as stakeholders that co-create value with their customers. Third, a division of labor among stakeholders specifies the corresponding responsibilities that must be met to create value. Fourth, value networks that support e-services often consist of multiple sub-networks – what we call segmented value networks – that must work in harmony with one another to enable firms and their customers to realize the key value propositions of e-services. This now represents the major effort that organizations that are involved in service innovation have undertaken. We invited two articles from ICEC 2009 that demonstrate the theme of service innovation and e-commerce for this special section. One article examines the value generated by an innovative e-services application. It studies mobile services that support the work of law enforcement officers, whose primary service is to maintain public security. The deployment of mobile services in this context strengthens the coordination and collaboration among different law enforcement units, but its impacts on the performance of law enforcement rely on its adoption and acceptance by law enforcement officers. The other article investigates adverse selection in online trust certification. This research assesses how the value generated by an e-commerce Web site is affected user perceptions of its security in support of transaction-making. Certification by a third party typically has the effect of strengthening user trust, which also is associated with an increase in the user’s intention to conduct online transactions. Thus, effectively managing issues that related to adverse selection in this context will be helpful in supporting effective e-service offerings. The special issue opens with an article by Paul Hu, Hsinchun Chen, Han-Fen Hu, Cathy Larson and Cynthia Butierez on ‘‘Law