Analyzing the sustainability of a newly developed service: An activity theory perspective

•We adopted Activity Theory to identify important factors that affect the sustainability of newly developed services.•Three new service development projects in tele-healthcare domain were analyzed to identify contradictions among stakeholders.•We traced the causes of the contradictions back to the early stages of a NSD project.•This study suggests that the sustainability of a newly developed service could be maintained by preventing contradictions occurred in NSD stages.•We concluded this study by deriving five propositions for developing sustainable new services.

New service development (NSD) is the process of creating new services to fulfill target customers' needs. It is essential that an NSD project team cooperate across organizational boundaries and various disciplines to achieve the sustainability goal of an NSD project. This study adopted Activity Theory to understand dynamics of complex service innovation system and model the actions taken by different entities in telehealth service projects, in which we identified important contradictions that affect the sustainability of newly developed services. Based on multiple case study findings, this research identified challenges for these new service development projects such as user needs identification, the involvement of emergent technology and collaboration between entities from different industries. This study contributes to the NSD research by proposing five propositions which could be used for guiding stakeholders to effectively manage NSD projects to offer sustainable newly developed services.