Service Productivity and Innovation

This chapter by John Bessant, Claudia Lehmann and Kathrin M. Möslein points out the challenges of service productivity. Service delivery is increasingly taking place against a backdrop of growing demand and often ever more limited resources. The problem is compounded by the globalisation and international tradability of many services so that a failure to be competitive may mean whole sectors are moved offshore. At the same time huge new possibilities are being opened up by technologies—for example changing the face of services like retailing by moving large parts of the service from the physical to the virtual world. And whilst new technologies offer opportunities to improve productivity, finding, evaluating and implementing them is a complex process. Further this chapter shows what types of service innovation do exist and where service innovation can take place. Four dimensions: ‘product’, ‘process’, ‘position’ and ‘paradigm’ are investigated from incremental improvement (‘doing what we do but better’) to radical change (‘doing something completely new’). Innovation is about the successful implementation of new ideas and to capture the benefits. This chapter helps to understand how the process happens in services. In particular the authors focus on innovation management and the question: What might we be able to do to make effective change happen? There has been extensive research around the generic theme of innovation management and although much of this has focused on the manufacturing sector, the authors point out some valuable lessons about the nature of service innovation which can help service managers to do better. In particular it is important to appreciate similarities and differences in innovation management within a service context. Finally this chapter provides an overview of the book structure and summarizes each part.