Service Innovation: Organizational Responses to Technological Opportunities & Market Imperatives

This unique collection brings together the latest academic research and management practice on innovation in services, and identifies a range of successful organizational responses to current technological opportunities and market imperatives. The contributors include leading researchers, consultants and practitioners in the field, who provide rigorous yet practical insights into managing and organizing innovation in services. Two themes help to integrate the contributions in this book:

• That generic good practices exist in the management and organization of innovation in services, which the authors seek to identify, but that these must be adapted to different contexts, specifically the scale and complexity of the tasks, the degree of customization of the offerings, and the uncertainty of the environment.

• That innovation in services is much more than the application of information technology (IT). In fact, the disappointing returns to IT investments in services have resulted in a widespread debate about the causes and potential solutions — the so-called “productivity paradox” in services. Instead here the authors adopt a broader notion of innovation, including technological, organizational and market change. The key is to match the configuration of organization and technology to the specific market environment.

Introduction (35 KB)
Chapter 1: Managing Service Innovation: Variations of Best Practice (490 KB)