The Smart Home: How Consumers Craft New Service Networks by Combining Heterogeneous Smart Domestic Products:

Service research suggests homes are becoming increasingly connected as consumers automate and personalize new forms of service provision. Yet, large-scale empirical evidence on how and why consumers automate smart domestic products (SDPs) is lacking. To address this knowledge gap, we analyze 13,905 consumer-crafted, automated combinations of SDPs, totaling 1,144,094 installations, across 253 separate service providers on the web service . An exploratory network analysis examines the topology of the network and an interpretive coding exercise reveals how consumers craft different styles of human-computer interaction to cocreate value. The results reveal that the SDP network is disassortative, is imbalanced, has a long-tailed degree distribution, and that popular services have high centrality across all product category combinations. We show that popular combinations of SDPs are primarily motivated by utilitarian value-seeking enacted through a preference for automated tasks outside of conscious attention, though more individualistic combinations are slightly more likely to be hedonistically inclined. We conclude by showing how these consumer-crafted forms of service provision within domestic environments reveal design redundancy and opportunities for service innovation.