Innovation And Quality Improvement In Service Organizations

This special issue of MSQ presents eight papers developed from selected high quality presentations made at the Sixth International Research Conference on Quality, Innovation and Knowledge. The Conference was presented by a consortium of Australian and Malaysian universities and held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 17-20 February 2002. In this issue, we are aiming to emphasise current trends in innovation and service quality improvement, and highlight the role that research can make in bridging theory and practice. Authors were invited to submit papers developed and extended from their conference presentations, all of which were double blind refereed prior to acceptance. Service organisations dominate many world economies and continue to expand. They can be characterised by their scope, the frequent difficulty in defining outcomes, the involvement of the customer in service delivery, and their emphasis on intangible assets such as knowledge and relationships. Service organisations are continually changing in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by globalisation, technology and competition. Managing innovation and quality improvement in services is therefore complex and multidisciplinary, often incorporating operations, marketing, finance, and information technology. The papers presented in this special issue illustrate both this disciplinary diversity and a range of services. They also include discussion and findings from both organisational and customer perspectives, and represent logistics, government, education, retail, e-retail, mass service situations and two cross-sectoral studies. In services, service quality is the integrating factor between an organisation and its customers, whether internal or external. Service quality is a measure of how well organisations manage their processes and whether they meet customer expectations. Both organisational antecedents and employee attitudes influence the delivery of service quality and, in turn, service quality has been shown to lead to customer responses and future behaviours, and organisational outcomes such as accountability and profits. We have arranged the papers in this issue so that broader business, government and educational perspectives are presented first, followed by inter-industry and organisational perspectives, and finally papers that employ customer data. The first paper, by Chapman, Soosay and Kandampully, provides an introduction to innovation in services and uses logistics to illustrate the fact that innovation is at the heart of the new business model required for organisational success. Its approach, based on the fundamental resources of technology, knowledge and relationship networks essential in the new business model, provides themes that are evident in some form throughout the other papers. Next, Avdjieva and Wilson also take a historic approach in their analysis of quality and learning organisations in higher education, and compare data collected in four