Service innovation process in creative-intensive business services organizations

The paper investigates the new service development process in the advertising industry. The creative firms are characterized by their originality and creativity of the service that they delivered. The focus of their business is on how to deliver creative and effective services for their customers. Through forty five in depth interviews with advertising managers, the exploratory study identifies the stages of developing new advertisements: client brief, information collection, problem diagnosis, strategic planning, creative briefing, idea generation, idea testing, idea selection, idea amplification, production, marketing test, launching, evaluation, and learning, and conceptualizes the advertising innovation process as five phases: the problem diagnosis phase, the idea conceptualization phase, the idea production phase, the commercialization phase, and the evaluation and learning phase. The results reveal that the new service development process is not a linear process. All these findings advance our knowledge of how to develop innovative services.