Service Innovation Management

Welive in a world where change is omnipresent, continuous, and increasingly difficult to anticipate or predict. Political and economic changes are opening up new markets and closing others; societies are evolving and their composition is changing; the rise and fall of new consumer trends only seem to accelerate. Expectations are changing, customers are becoming more and more difficult to satisfy or delight (Oliver et al., 1997), and heterogeneity among them is increasing. At the same time, many basic and less basic services have turned into commodities, increasing global competition and rivalry. In response to all or many of these challenges, service providers invent, develop and provide new – and better – service offers, while developing and implementing new – and better – service delivery technologies at the same time. Whether it is to be able to successfully launch entirely new services, to support existing products with new services, to adapt existing services to new requirements, or to apply old concepts in new domains: the development of far-reaching competences in service innovation management has become crucial to the success of the new service firm. Still, however, too many (high technology) service innovations fail, or do not fulfil their inventors’ expectations. As most innovation projects require substantial investments from the innovating firm, it is of the utmost importance to identify the factors that increase the chances of successful service innovation, to help service providers improve their competitive position and deliver upon their promises. Service innovation success factors have been identified in various dimensions: in this special issue two major dimensions of service innovation success factors are dealt with: (1) the quality of the service delivery technology; and (2) the composition and contents of the service offer. Once a service – any service – is launched, the most important question for service managers becomes: how can we attract more customers, satisfy them and keep them? In other words: how can we best improve our service offer, while optimally using our limited resources? Each of the well-crafted articles in this special issue investigates an innovation related issue in service management, trying to answer this question in one way or another. In answering the question, some authors or author teams clearly have more general and academic ambitions, while others write to directly help decision-makers in a specific service sector to make better service innovation decisions. Let the reader decide which article(s) best answers the question. Service technology New service delivery technologies are introduced with the speed of light, offering advantages of modularity and customization, enabling providers to adapt their services not only to the rapidly changing consumer trends, but also to the varying requirements of more and more customer segments. The introduction and management of