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?

Timeline

• January 2, 2027: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• March 31, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission

Tina Dacin, Queen's University

Robin Holt, University of Bristol

Jean Clarke, Emlyon Business School

Jaco Lok, Macquarie University

Max Ganzin, Macquarie University

This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of venture creation, opportunity recognition, and stakeholder engagement. It invites scholars to reimagine entrepreneurship as an inherently ethical practice, instead of viewing ethics as a constraint or an afterthought in the pursuit of economic gain. The intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship presents a unique opportunity to rethink and shape new ethical paradigms and foster innovative approaches to the persistent questions of responsibility, justice, and human flourishing. Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as a catalyst for creativity, imagination, and the capacity to disrupt, yet it has also drawn criticism for promoting ideals that valorize self-optimization and commodification. The foundational activities of entrepreneurship – venture creation, opportunity enactment, and creative destruction – are themselves inextricably bound to questions of ethics.

At the core of any entrepreneurial act is its willing encounter with, and encouragement of, 'the other' - whether this means novel products, new practices, uncertain futures, or transformed habits. From some philosophical perspectives, such as phenomenology, ethical experience also involves engagement with the 'other,' coupled with a refusal to confine or transform 'the other' to the norm. Yet this raises a critical question: if entrepreneurship courts 'the other,' does it then corrupt and empty this otherness in the calculated pursuit of economic returns? If ethics entails a life lived alongside difference, then how do entrepreneurial lives compare to those shaped and scripted by the certainty and commitment to principled forms of the good advocated by other philosophical positions, such as deontology? This SI is dedicated to papers investigating this uneasy yet intimate relationship between ethics and entrepreneurship.

Different philosophical perspectives can offer unique insights into the interplay between ethics and entrepreneurship, including virtue ethics, care ethics, pragmatism, capabilities approaches, as well as deontology and phenomenology. Similarly, different schools in entrepreneurship studies, from early traditions in evolutionary economics or trait theory, to more recent perspectives associated with alertness to opportunity, emergence and creativity, and actualization, provide different stimulus for ethicists. While entrepreneurship is often associated with opportunity-seeking and value creation, its concern with seeking support from others, and with growing an organizational form that sustains the livelihood of others, extends its operations beyond economic and industrial narratives of profit, and product- and service innovation.

Entrepreneurial ventures are embedded within complex networks of stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, non-human systems, and communities. Navigating these relationships demands ethical judgment that balances competing interests, priorities, and values. Unlike managerial decision-making, which tends to rely on established protocols, systems, and formalized structures, entrepreneurial judgment occurs in a context of greater uncertainty and fluidity, where ethical considerations are threaded into the very fabric of entrepreneurial practice.

Entrepreneurs must establish trust, negotiate power dynamics, and create shared meaning among diverse stakeholders, all while remaining attuned to the broader societal and environmental implications of their actions. They continually navigate competing values, and face unpredictable consequences within 'spaces of ambiguity,' where loosened norms make ethical reasoning both precarious and generative. In such spaces, distinguishing a 'good reason' for action from simply 'a reason to act' carry significant personal, social and commercial resonance, raising fundamental questions about the nature of ethical responsibility in conditions of flux and uncertainty, about the requirement to follow rules or break them, about the intimacy between the social and ethical commitments inherent in entrepreneurship, and about the relationship between entrepreneurial flourishing and care.

If we can still speak of 'the entrepreneur,' it is as a figure that challenges the viability of the sovereign self, continually narrating identity through stories of venturing and novelty. The entrepreneurial self emerges through an ongoing process of becoming – an engagement with chance, contingency and creative responsiveness. The entrepreneur lives out an experimental existence, embracing uncertainty and 'becoming' through the act of venturing into the unknown, through proffering of alternatives, often oppositional ones. This insight invites deeper explorations of both how organizations are formed, and stakeholders are engaged in sustaining what we might call 'good shape' – a venture that remains dynamic yet coherent amidst uncertainty and change.

In bringing entrepreneurship and ethics into philosophical dialogue, each field can deepen its appreciation of itself and the other. Entrepreneurship studies can learn from how ethicists have conceptualized difference, authenticity, autonomy, duty, care and recognition. These ethical-philosophical concepts invite a deeper reflection on the responsibilities of entrepreneurs – not only towards stakeholders but towards the wider social and ecological systems in which they operate. In turn, ethical theorists can learn from entrepreneurship's philosophical examination of contingency, creativity, and emergent futures that foregrounds fluidity, moral luck, and improvisation.

Potential topics

• Philosophical Dimensions of Ethics: How do different philosophical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, phenomenology, hermeneutics) inform our understanding of entrepreneurship as an ethical practice? How are traditions confirmed or transformed when ethics is viewed through an entrepreneurial lens?
• Phenomenology of the Entrepreneurial Experience: In what sense are entrepreneurial experiences of uncertainty, autonomy, and decision-making ethical, and how does phenomenology illuminate Kierkegaard's 'finitude' of lived reality?
• The Entrepreneur and Ethical Subjectivity: How can ethical theories of 'subjecthood', agency, embodiment, and 'self' inform understandings of the entrepreneur, and how might post-human ethics further enrich the question 'Who is the entrepreneur'?
• Ethics and Rule-Breaking: Ethically, what is the connection between following and breaking rules, and how might entrepreneurial theory enrich understandings of this connection?
• Stakeholder Relations and Trust: How do entrepreneurs navigate stakeholder dynamics and trust-building while pursuing ethical objectives and are these forms of trust akin to those envisaged in current ethical theorising?
• Entrepreneurship as Inherently Ethical or Unethical: Is entrepreneurship inherently ethical or exploitative, and how can these views inform a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial ethics? How core are ethics to entrepreneurship?
• Entrepreneurship and Technological Mediation: In the digital age of machine protocols, does judgment still matter—and is entrepreneurship a break from, or reinvention of, the network, platform, and stack?
• Ethics, Value, and Entrepreneurial Goals: Can ethical theories of value and worth contribute to the framing of entrepreneurial goals and opportunity?
• Temporal Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Ethics: How do entrepreneurial decisions compare immediate gains with long-term ethical considerations? In what ways does the entrepreneurial relationship to time create unique ethical challenges and opportunities?

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Full paper submission deadline