Service innovation – organizational and systemic approaches

This chapter discusses four central perspectives to service innovation: managing innovation processes, taking a strategic stance to innovation, promoting user-based and employee-driven innovation, and answering the need for systemic innovations. The chapter shows that Jon Sundbo has contributed in a notable way to research in all these areas. He has introduced the idea of balanced empowerment to emphasize the importance of strategy in the inducement and control of innovation activities. His framework of strategic reflexivity focuses on the top-down processes that integrate distributed novelties. On the other hand, customer encounter–based innovation supplements the picture by analysing the bottom-up processes in which grassroots employees transmit users’ ideas into the organization. The concept of after-innovation points out that the active role of users also continues after the launch. At the broader societal level, Sundbo has participated in the discussion about the systemic nature of innovations by analysing value chain innovations.