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 methods described include original and innovative methodological approaches, such as technology-oriented scenario analysis, experiments and laddering, as well as critical incident techniques, social network analysis, blogs, visual techniques, narratives and future workshops. Together, the chapters encourage readers to understand service innovation research as a process that requires creative methodological thinking. The book adapts various methods and processes from different areas of research, and evaluates their strengths, limitations and possible applications in specific areas of service innovation. Researchers and academics will find this collection to be an essential state-of-the-art resource for research in the fields of service innovation and innovation in general. The book will also appeal to practitioners and consultants dealing with both public and private service organisations. Contributors include: C. Forder, L. Fuglsang, N.N. Grünbaum, A.V. Hansen, F. Lapenta, J.K. Møller, A.R. Olesen, A. Scupola, F. Sørensen, J. Sundbo

Advance praise for Service Innovation: "To the CEOs of all service companies I deal with: READ THIS BOOK!" -- Dave Wascha, senior director, Bing Product Management, Microsoft Corporation "Lance Bettencourt deftly blends his academic and consulting experience to provide an example-rich, readable, practical, and innovative discussion of service innovation." -- Leonard Berry, coauthor of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic "Provides the robust framework to design services that unlock growth opportunities for every business." -- Lance Reschke, vice president, Ceridian Corporation "The tools and guidance in this book will inspire companies, small and large, to create effective and innovative services that are desperately needed." -- Mary Jo Bitner, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and coauthor of Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm "Cracks the code from the fuzzy front end through the complete life cycle of Service Innovation." -- Angelo Rago, division vice president, Global Customer Services, Abbott Medical Optics "Filled with rich examples of how firms can innovate service through helping customers get jobs done." -- Stephen W. Brown, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University "Any leader intent on providing distinctive value to customers must read Service Innovation." -- Michael Reynolds, staff vice president, Commercial Marketing, WellPoint, Inc. If there’s one truism about the service sector, it's that businesses don't succeed by inventing a better mousetrap; they succeed by finding the best, most cost-effective way to get rid of their customers' mice. In industries ranging from heavy machinery to health care to financial services to consumer goods, service innovation is helping businesses find new revenue streams--and enhance existing ones--by satisfying their customer's need to get things done. Few understand this better than Lance Bettencourt, a strategy adviser at Strategyn and a leading educator in management innovation consulting. And in Service Innovation, Bettencourt gives a master's class on the art and science of creating breakthrough service products. True service innovation demands that you shift the focus away from the solution and back to the customer. To achieve this shift in your business--one that takes you from making educated guesses to building a clear model to guide service innovation--Bettencourt instructs on the finer points of how to rethink your approach to the customer's needs: how the customer defines value in a product or service. Bettencourt mines nearly 20 years' experience in teaching and advising clients with service- and product-dominant businesses to demonstrate proven ways you can build, streamline, and focus your company's service product innovation processes. Among the numerous key ideas and practices are: Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve—and how your products deliver value to them Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products Practical guidance on staying focused on the "fuzzy front end" of service innovation The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy Finding new ways to help people solve problems and get things done is why there are goods and services in the first place. And in Service Innovation, Lance Bettencourt fills a vital need by delivering the essential guide that can put your business on the latest frontier of value creation.

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.

In the most advanced service economies, services create up to three-quarters of the wealth and 85% of employment, and yet we know relatively little about managing innovation in this sector. The critical role of services, in the broadest sense, has long been recognized, but is still not well understood. Most research and management prescriptions have been based on the experience of manufacturing and high technology sectors. There is a clear need to distinguish which, if any, of what we know about managing innovation in manufacturing is applicable to services, what must be adapted, and what is distinct and different. Such is the goal of this book. 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: . OCo 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. OCo 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 OCo the so-called OC productivity paradoxOCO 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. Sample Chapter(s). Introduction (35 KB). Chapter 1: Managing Service Innovation: Variations of Best Practice (490 KB). Contents: Conceptual and Analytical Frameworks for Service Innovation: Services and the Knowledge-Based Economy (I Miles); Service Innovation: Aiming to Win (T Clayton); Sector and National Studies of Innovation in Services: Innovation in Healthcare Delivery (D J Bower); Product Development in Financial Services: Picking the Right Leader for Success (E Chortatsiani); Applying Innovation Management Good Practice to Services: A Composite Framework of Product Development and Delivery Effectiveness in Services (F M Hull & J Tidd); Product Development in Service Enterprises: Case Studies of Good Practice (F M Hull); and other articles. Readership: Graduate students and researchers in management programs; managers."

"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.

'Knowledge and Innovation in the New Service Economy is an interesting book that provides a good overview of recent trends in the service sector. . . . This book is recommended for libraries supporting upper division and graduate programs in international business and e-commerce, or for those who want a thorough overview of the knowledge-based service economy.' - Steven W. Staninger, Business Information Alert Knowledge and innovation are key factors contributing to growth and prosperity in the new service economy. This book presents original, empirical and theoretical contributions to address the economic dimensions of knowledge and the organisation of knowledge intensive activity through specialised services. Specific analyses include: * macro statistics to highlight the contribution of services to economic activity * firm level survey data to identify and consider client relations * case studies of four innovation-oriented business services.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the Third Australian Symposium on Service Research and Innovation, ASSRI 2013, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in November 2013. Overall, eight research papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. They are multidisciplinary in scope and cover strategic, organizational, and technological dimensions, ranging from purely conceptual to concrete implementations and testing of service-related technological platforms. Taken together, these papers provide a snapshot of the critical concerns and developments in service-related research and cover some of the key areas of research focus.