Services, innovation and performance: general presentation

This special issue of the Journal of Innovation Economics is given over to services considered from the point of view of innovation and performance and against a background of sustainable development. Although contemporary economies are undeniably service economies, since services are now our main source of wealth and jobs, the relationship between services, on the one hand, and innovation and performance, on the other, continues to be a matter of considerable debate. Thus in the still dominant industrialist or technologist approach to this relationship, innovation efforts and performance levels in services are underestimated. It is this approach that is responsible for the existence of two gaps: an innovation gap and a performance gap (Djellal and Gallouj, 2010). The innovation gap indicates that our economies contain invisible or hidden innovations that are not captured by the traditional indicators of innovation, while the performance gap is reflected in an underestimation of the efforts directed towards improving performance (or certain forms of performance) in those economies. These gaps may have harmful consequences for the validity of the public policies implemented at national or European level. Since they are based on imperfect or even erroneous forecasts, these policies may also prove to be inappropriate. These gaps have their origin in certain more or less ancient myths about the fundamental nature of services (Gallouj, 2002) and the errors of measurement associated with them. The aim of this special issue is to help fill the innovation and performance gaps, or in other words to rescue these invisible innovations and forms of performance from the oblivion to which they have been consigned.