This is an essential read for managers in forms that used to have a product focus and that are trying to shift towards designing services and experiences. By covering the early stages of the innovation process, it guides readers throught developing new knowledge, creating service concepts and prototyping experiences. It's valuable not only for service innovation and design practicioners but also visionary business leaders who understand that creating destinct customer experiences is the future of innovation.

"This book provides a comprehensive collection of research and analysis on the principles of service, knowledge and organizational capabilities, clarifying IT strategy procedures and management practices and how they are used to shape a firm's knowledge resources"--Provided by publisher.

All the world's most advanced economies are dominated by service. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employees. The questions posed in the book are: (1) How is it growing; (2) what are these new service innovations; (3) what are the drivers; and (4) how can organizations work with service innovations in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. Based on this view, we develop a model of service innovation and develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective; how should an organization view its customers in order to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.

Research Methods in Service Innovation provides an essential methodological toolbox for researchers, students and practitioners interested in better understanding innovation and improving innovation processes in service organisations. Each chapter presents a specific method, introduces its theoretical foundations, explains its practical application, and provides examples and suggestions for its implementation.

The book documents the state-of-the-art in Services Science. It combines contributions in Service Engineering, Service Management and Service Marketing and helps to develop a roadmap for future R and D activities in these fields. The book is written for researchers in engineering and management.

In recent years there has been a growing tendency to regard service research as an independent academic discipline. However, the establishment of thereof is closely intertwined with methodological issues. But, What methodological foundations is the discipline built on? The book, which focuses on the field of service innovation, was launched precisely in order to study the discipline's methodological foundations and the need to develop and modify specific service research methods in the context of specific examples.

Case Studies in Service Innovation provides the reader fresh insight into how innovation occurs in practice, and stimulates learning from one context to another. The volume brings together contributions from researchers and practitioners in a celebration of achievements with the intention of adding to the wider understanding of how service innovation develops. Each case presents a brief description of the context in which the innovation occurred, the opportunity that led to the innovation and an overview of the innovation itself, also addressing how success was measured, what success has been achieved to date and providing links to further information. The book is organized around five major themes, each reflecting recognized sources of service innovation: Business Model Innovation: new ways of creating, delivering or capturing economic, social, environmental and other types of value; The Organization in its Environment: an organization engaging beyond its own boundaries, with public private partnerships, sourcing knowledge externally, innovation networks, and open or distributed innovation; Innovation Management within an Organization: an organization actively encouraging innovation within its own boundaries using project teams, internal governance of innovation, and methods or tools that stimulate innovation; Process Innovation: changes in service design and delivery processes, such as consumer led innovation or consumers as part of the innovation process, service operations management, and educational processes; Technology Innovation: the use of technology, including ICT enabled innovation, ICTs that are themselves innovative and support the delivery of new services, new ICT services, new ways of delivering services associated with ICT products, and technology other than ICT. The final part of the book is given to four extended cases allowing for a more in-depth treatment of innovation within a complex service system. The extended cases also illustrate two important and growing trends, firstly the need for, and benefits of, a more customer centric approach to service innovation and secondly the need for better understanding of public services and the role of public-private partnerships in identifying and achieving innovation.