Beyond technological innovation: trajectories and varieties of services innovation

Technology is undoubtedly a core element of innovation in services. However in services more than anywhere else technology is not sufficient to take into account the whole innovation phenomena in services. The aim of this chapter is to present a set of works that share the goal of going beyond technological innovation without neglecting it. Their general purpose is to display the varieties of forms and trajectories of innovation in services. According to the analytical priority they focus on these works can be divided into two different categories 1 : service based or service oriented approaches, focusing on service specificities in the field of innovation ; and integrated approaches aiming at adopting a similar approach to the economic analysis of both goods and services. The latter notion is based on the observation that the boundary between goods and services is becoming increasingly less clear. Certain services are being "industrialised" and, conversely, the production of certain goods is being "tertiarised". These converging tendencies are often described in terms of the goods-services continuum and functions. I especially intend to try and enrich and operationalise these approaches by using a characteristics representation of the product drawn upon the work of Lancaster (1966) and Saviotti and Metcalfe (1984).