Evolving Obligatory Passage Points to Sustain Service Systems: The Case of Traditional Market Revitalization in Hsinchu City, Taiwan

Abstract

“City” could be viewed as an integration of various service systems with relocated social, economic, and environmental capitals under urbanization. It was evidential in Hsinchu City, Taiwan, where once the biggest market, Dongmen Market (DMM), declined because the replacement of urban consumption patterns along with the setup of high tech science park bringing new residences. This research took the perspectives of Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) to study the development of new service systems and how they were sustained through the revitalization by a two-year ethnographic study. We explain how stakeholders propose and receive value within and among service systems. A unique actor called obligatory passage point (OPP) was formed in the translation phases of actor networks, delivering the co-created value by stakeholders with different interests. Four identified OPPs indicated that their “evolution process” drove the revitalization of DMM toward a sustainable service system. A framework of open innovation practice was formulated as iterative cycles with four phases: (1) actor interacting; (2) value co-creating; (3) relationship modeling; and (4) OPP transforming, which operationalized the OPP evolution from its destruction to construction. The application of the OPP evolution process to revitalizing urban service systems contributes to practitioners in social innovation to sustain urban service systems in addition to the theoretical formation of OPP evolution.