Creating, Measuring, and Managing Impact in Complex Service Systems

Description

A complex service system is an interdependent multi-actor system of service providers and users that jointly produce and deliver services, with outcomes emerging dynamically through interactions across contexts. Complex service systems such as healthcare, financial services, public administration, education, and social care significantly shape the wellbeing of individuals and societies by determining how essential services are delivered, which in turn directly affects people's daily lives and long-term outcomes. Innovation in these settings is often practice-driven rather than theory-driven. Professionals embedded within service delivery contexts are positioned at the interface of users and operational realities, where they continuously encounter emerging needs, service breakdowns, and contextual constraints. This enables them to generate need-based, practice-led innovations that directly reshape service processes and outcomes. Many studies offer theoretical advancements in identifying the factors and processes that may influence service performance within the system, yet they provide limited evidence of how research-based insights translate into tangible change in practice.

Research impact is often referenced but operationalised inconsistently in complex service contexts. It may involve observable changes in user behaviour, improvements in service delivery processes, adoption of new technologies, enhancements in organisational practices, or influence on policy and system-level coordination. Impact outcomes often unfold over extended time horizons, and interventions may generate unintended consequences. Together with the interdependencies across actors within the complex service system, this makes demonstrating research impact particularly challenging. Furthermore, differing priorities among stakeholders, such as service providers, users, regulators, and partners, further complicate the evaluation of the impact outcomes.

Funding bodies, universities, communities and the public, and journals increasingly expect clear evidence that research delivers societal, economic, or policy value within complex service sectors. This expectation is particularly salient in contexts such as healthcare, education, and public services, where multiple actors, technologies, and institutions interact. As a result, researchers are under growing pressure to demonstrate how their work produces tangible or intangible outcomes that justify the significant resources invested. In response to this growing pressure, this special issue aims to demonstrate and advance the understanding of how research may impact in complex service contexts.

Providing credible evidence of research impact in the context of complex service systems is critical, and this special issue seeks submissions that provide robust empirical evidence of meaningful, valuable, and ethical change. Submissions may draw on multiple methods or approaches, including but not limited to qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, or experimental research. The research may span different timeframes, and participatory or creative research methods are particularly encouraged. Collaborating with non-academic stakeholders such as policymakers and industry practitioners may enrich perspectives on what impact is, how it emerges, and how it can be evaluated.

Impact is not inherently positive, as the pursuit of measurable outcomes may create distortions, inequities, or ethical tensions. Key questions include who defines what counts as valuable impact and whose interests are prioritised or marginalised. Impact is rarely instantaneous; it unfolds over time. Understanding how impact emerges, evolves, and diffuses can offer actionable insights for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and communities themselves. Evidence about what types of research approaches, such as interventions, co-design, field experiments, participatory methods, and collaborative partnerships with industry players, generate stronger impact is crucial to help scholars design studies that are both theoretically rigorous and practically influential.

Potential topics

• What frameworks and metrics can be used to assess behavioural, cognitive, relational, or systemic change resulting from research, and how can they capture impacts across the diverse stakeholders involved in complex service systems?
• How can research impact in complex services be understood and assessed beyond financial metrics, including intellectual, professional, social, and personal development outcomes across diverse stakeholder groups?
• How do the interdependencies, governance structures, and stakeholder relationships characteristic of complex service systems enable or inhibit research impact?
• What common patterns or trajectories of impact emerge across complex service systems, particularly in relation to how value and impact are distributed among multiple stakeholders over time?
• What mechanisms pathways enable the progression from awareness to engagement and ultimately to sustained change in generating research impact, and how are these shaped by the complexity of service systems and stakeholder interactions?
• What forms of longitudinal or field-based evidence are needed to capture dynamic changes in stakeholder mindsets, behaviours, and systemic outcomes in complex service systems characterised by interdependence and co-evolution?
• What roles do co-creation, stakeholder collaboration, and service design play in enabling research impact across multiple stakeholders, and how do these processes operate within complex service systems?
• How do intervention-based or design-based research approaches produce and sustain measurable behavioural, organisational, and system-level outcomes in complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors and dynamic change?
• In what ways have research insights informed and reshaped policy, professional practice, service design, or stakeholder decision-making in complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors and competing stakeholder priorities?
• Under what conditions is research impact realised, scaled, sustained, or constrained within complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors, institutional complexity, and dynamic change?
• How can researchers capture and evaluate both short-term and long-term impact in complex service systems characterised by interdependence, co-evolution, and evolving stakeholder relationships?
• How can researchers identify both intended and unintended consequences of research impact in complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors and competing stakeholder interests?
• What ethical considerations arise in the design, implementation, and measurement of research impact in complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors, power asymmetries, and potentially uneven distribution of benefits and harms?
• How do power dynamics shape what is defined, recognised, and prioritised as "valuable" outcomes in evaluating research impact in complex service systems characterised by interdependent actors, institutional logics, and unequal stakeholder influence?
• How are impacts of complex services experienced differently across stakeholder groups?
• What stakeholder voices have been underrepresented in research in complex services?
• How can organisations identify and manage unequal or unintended stakeholder impacts complex service systems in which actors are interdependent, influence is unevenly distributed, and outcomes are experienced differently across stakeholders?
• How do professional, organisational, and societal interests align or conflict in complex service contexts?