Service design and innovation are receiving greater attention from the service research community because they play crucial roles in creating new forms of value cocreation with customers, ...organizations, and societal actors in general. Service innovation involves a new process or service offering that creates value for one or more actors in a service network. Service design brings new service ideas to life through a human-centered and holistic design thinking approach. However, service design and innovation build on dispersed multidisciplinary contributions that are still poorly understood. The special issue that follows offers important contributions through the examination of service design and innovation literature, the links between service design and innovation, the role of customers in service design and innovation, and service design and innovation for well-being. Building on these contributions, this article develops a future research agenda in three areas: (1) reinforcing and expanding the foundations of service design and innovation by integrating multiple perspectives and methods; (2) advancing service design and innovation by improving the connection between the two areas, deepening actor involvement, and leveraging the role of technology; and (3) upframing service design and innovation to strengthen research impact by innovating complex value networks and service ecosystems and by building a cornerstone for transformative service research.
In the service industry, word of mouth (WOM) has become an important indicator for influencing customer behaviour and developing marketing strategies. The current study develops a new theoretical ...model to analyse the moderating mechanism of electronic WOM, and further considers a multiple mediation analysis of how service innovation may influence in-person word of mouth (WOM) through service quality and brand loyalty. The results show that managers need to focus on WOM to improve customer service quality perception and encourage revisits. A study of 939 customers of a famous hotpot restaurant provides supporting evidence for this moderated mediation analysis. This study also discusses how this intriguing design of moderated mediation could be clarified using regulatory focus theory and further literature.
•The ability to innovate increases sustainable business performance.•Green innovations are hard to imitate in the market.•Green technology companies should not focus only on creating products.•They ...should also provide business solutions to end-users.
In response to greater environmental awareness among stakeholders, companies have become increasingly interested in practices such as eco-innovation. Despite the expanding literature on eco-innovation, scholars have so far paid little attention to the study of eco-innovation and its impact on business sustainability, particularly considering the mediating effect of service innovation capability. To fill this research gap, this study extends the concepts of green business by investigating an original conceptual framework, which proposes that the capacity for service innovation has a mediating effect on the relationship between sustainable organizational performance and environmental innovation. This conceptual framework is subjected to empirical testing, implemented through a survey involving 95 Malaysian firms which use green technology. Data is collected through both postal and online questionnaires and analyzed through structural equation modeling using partial least squares. Respondents for this paper were identified using the directories of MyHijau (2013) and the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation, 2014. The results suggest that: (1) eco-innovations unlock better sustainable performance; (2) service innovation capability has a partially significant positive mediating effect; (3) service innovation capability ultimately benefits companies by allowing them to differentiate through an emphasis on value creation; (4) service capability can also act as a business strategy to create barriers to new entry by competitors. Thus, eco-innovation and service innovation capability tend to represent significant intangible resources and enable an organization to achieve long-term objectives, competitive advantage and business sustainability. To date, this is the first study relating eco-innovation, service innovation capability and sustainability performance in the Malaysian corporate context and using a specific sample of companies that make use of green technologies.
AI climate-driven service analytics capability has been anecdotally argued as a viable strategy to enhance service innovation and market performance in B2B markets. While AI climate refers to the ...shared perceptions of policies, procedures, and practices to support AI initiatives, cognitive service analytics capability refers to the analytical insights driven by AI climate and augmented by both machines and humans to make marketing decisions. However, there is limited knowledge on the antecedents of such analytics capabilities and their overall effects on service innovation and market performance. Drawing on service analytics literature and the microfoundations of dynamic capability theory, this study fills this research gap using in-depth interviews (n = 30) and a survey (n = 276) of service analytics managers within the AI climate in Australia. The findings confirm the five microfoundations of cognitive service analytics capabilities (cognitive technology, cognitive information, cognitive problem solving, cognitive knowledge & skills, cognitive training & development). The findings also highlight the significant mediating effect of service innovation in the relationship between analytics climate and market performance and cognitive service analytics capability and market performance.
•AI climate is opening new analytics frontiers in industrial marketing•We confirm five microfoundations of cognitive service analytics capability.•We show how AI climate driven analytics influence innovation and performance.
The ability of manufacturing companies to offer advanced services and achieve superior financial performance remains an open question in the servitization literature. One central question relates to ...how providers govern customer relationships to realize profits through servitization. This study addresses this question by unraveling the complex relations between advanced service provision, relational governance strategies, and the financial performance of manufacturing firms. Drawing on a dataset of 50 Swedish advanced service providers, this study uses a configurational comparative method—namely, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)—to identify the influence of configurations of governance conditions (i.e., service innovation, perceived switching costs, the attractiveness of alternatives, and explicit contracts) on firm performance. This study contributes through the identification of three alternative governance strategies that enable advanced service providers to benefit from service provision: 1) innovation governance strategy (high service innovation, low attractiveness of alternatives, and low use of explicit contracts); 2) relational governance strategy (high service innovation, high perceived switching costs, and low use of explicit contracts); and 3) market-based governance strategy (high service innovation, low perceived switching costs, high attractiveness of alternatives, and high use of explicit contracts). These results enrich the literature on servitization and advanced services by reflecting the need to apply diverse relational governance strategies. The results suggest multiple paths to superior financial performance.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the concepts of open government data (OGD) and co-creation are related; however, there is currently only limited empirical material available exploring the link ...between the two. This paper aims to help clarify the relationship between these two concepts by exploring a recently coined phenomenon: OGD-driven co-created public services. These services 1) utilize or are driven by OGD; 2) are co-created by stakeholders from different groups; and 3) produce public value for society. Due to the relative newness of the phenomenon an inductive exploratory case study is undertaken on Chicago's use of OGD in the co-creation of their food safety inspection forecasting model. This model forecasts critical food safety violations at food serving establishments and sends inspectors to the highest risk establishments first. The results of this exploratory work led to the discovery of a ‘perfect storm’ of six factors that seem to play a key role in allowing OGD-driven public service co-creation to take place. These factors are motivated stakeholders, innovative leaders, proper communication, an existing OGD portal, external funding, and agile development.
•This paper provides a case study of Chicago’s Open Government Data Driven Co-Created Food Inspection Forecasting Model•The paper presents an overview of the current literature on Open Government Data drivers and barriers•This article discusses six factors that create a ‘perfect storm’ for open government data driven co-creation•Theoretical propositions about the co-creation of open government data driven public services are put forth
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. As worldwide institutions acknowledge the necessity of ...digital, open, and collaborative governments, this timely book offers a comprehensive exploration of digital transformation, intergovernmental collaboration, collaborative governance, and public sector innovation.
•Provided a literature selection of 119 papers on Knowledge Graph (KG) exploitations in industrial products & services.•Recapped the customization and enhancement on KG to fit in industrial products ...& services.•Summarized the KG-mitigated industry pain points in industrial product development and service innovation.•Depicted the current challenges of KG and KG-enabled information systems to be applied to industrial products & services.•Proposed the future perspectives of promoting KG’s availability and productivity for industrial products & services.
The rapid development of information and communication technologies has enabled a value co-creation paradigm for developing industrial products and services, where massive heterogeneous data and multidisciplinary knowledge are generated and leveraged. In this context, Knowledge Graph (KG) emerges as a promising tool to elicit, fuse, process, and utilize numerous entities and relationships embedded in products and services, as well as their stakeholders. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is scarcely any comprehensive and thorough discussion about making full use of KG’s potentials to solve pain points of product development and service innovation in the industry. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper conducted a systematic survey of KG exploitations in industrial products and services and the customizations towards higher adaptability to practices. The authors selected 119 representative papers (up to 10/03/2021) together with other 29 supplementary works to summarize the technical and practical efforts and discuss the current challenges of exploiting KG in industrial products and services. Meantime, this work also highlights enhancing KG’s availability and boosting its productivity in industrial products and services development as the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can provide a basis for the explorations and implementations of KG-supported industrial product and services development, and attract more open discussions to the exploitation of KG-enabled industrial information systems.
Service innovation is a key driver of service infusion for manufacturers. Although service innovation is widely researched for service firms, it is less explored for service infusion in ...manufacturers. Existing research about service infusion considers developing customer knowledge in sales and service delivery, but there is scarce research about how manufacturers develop customer knowledge during new service development (NSD). This study investigates customer knowledge development within manufacturers and considers how it differs between the development of incremental and radical service innovations. A study was undertaken with 239 European manufacturers which revealed multiple drivers of customer knowledge development, service innovation performance, and firm performance. Developing incremental service innovations are more successful when customers participate in NSD teams while developing radical service innovations leads manufacturers to higher firm performance.
•Service innovation is a key for succeeding with service infusion in manufacturers.•Manufacturers undertaking incremental service innovations have most to gain when involving customers in new service development.•A focus on radical service innovation drives manufacturers firm performance, while a focus on incremental service innovation defends the present market position.
This study proposes a higher-order multidimensional construct of service innovation readiness (SIR) based on the organizational change literature and the awareness–motivation–capability perspective. ...Service innovation is gaining more attention due to its potential value for creating competitive advantage and improving organizational performance. This research conceptualizes SIR to consist of two adopting contexts (i.e., “strategic orientation toward service innovation” and “enabling mechanism of service innovation”) that, together, determine a firm's preparation to adopt organizational changes involved in service innovation. Six dimensions are also identified from a literature review and verified by industry expert interviews to define the two multidimensional adopting contexts. Data collected from 312 Taiwanese firms provide evidence to support the proposed factor structure of SIR and show that SIR positively correlates with SI performance. The findings contribute to the literature by theorizing SIR with a parsimonious structure that captures the complex conditions necessary for adopting service innovation. This study also yields some insight into the management of service innovation by providing managers an assessment that can be used to gauge a firm's status and direct its efforts in continuous improvement.
► We propose a multidimensional framework of “service innovation readiness” (SIR). ► SIR consists of “Strategic orientation toward SI” and “enabling mechanism for SI”. ► The results show that SIR has a positive effect on service innovation performance. ► SIR provides the firms a tool for self-diagnosis and guidance to allocate SI efforts.