What Is Social About Service Innovation? Contributions of Research on Social Innovation to Understanding Service Innovation

The emergent domain of Service Science is dominated by business management and technical views of services and their innovation potential. A sociological theory of services can supply a conceptual framework for services as processes of mediation, of mutual reference, or of interaction or communication between a production situation and a usage situation. On the users’ side, participation in service processes may be understood as productive activity (J. Gershuny) in the sense of purposeful proactive engagement with persons or artefacts (objects or symbols). This change in the mode of realising a particular desired “function” can be defined as social innovation. Current discussions on socially desirable forms of service innovation and their chances of gaining widespread acceptance could well profit from this concept. Investigation of each of the elements of productive activity (time, place, resources, objectives, hurdles) and the way they are changed by the diffusion of new services is the task of current studies in the sociology of service innovation.