ServiceInnovation

Innovation is widely recognized to be a critical contributor to economic growth, quality of life, and industrial competitiveness. Accordingly, a whole discipline of “innovation studies” emerged during the last quarter of the twentieth century, with major impacts on economic policymaking, management thinking, and approaches to science and technology studies. But innovation research was overwhelmingly focused on technological innovation in manufacturing sectors – and in particular, on high-tech sectors such as pharmaceuticals, electronics, and aerospace. It was not until the last decade of the twentieth century that serious and sustained attention to service industries and firms, and their innovation processes and outcomes, was more than the province of a few pioneers. We now have almost two decades of such analysis, and this chapter reviews highlights of the literature. Since the area covered by “services” and “service innovation” is so vast, and because the literature is fragmented across many disciplines, the aim is to give a broad overview rather than to synthesize the literature into a new grand theory. It is apparent that there are many ways in which service innovation parallels the processes described for manufacturing activities, and that some of the “new” features that are brought to light are ones that also exists in manufacturing firms but that have typically been neglected. The study of service innovation leads us to reconsider how we think about innovation more generally.