Service Innovation

Anders Gustafsson · Per Kristensson · Gary R. Schirr · Lars Witell

Apr 2016 · Business Expert Press

About this ebook

All the world's most advanced economies are dominated by service. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employees. The questions posed in the book are: (1) How is it growing; (2) what are these new service innovations; (3) what are the drivers; and (4) how can organizations work with service innovations in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. Based on this view, we develop a model of service innovation and develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective; how should an organization view its customers in order to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.

About the author

Anders Gustafsson is a professor of business administration in the CTF-Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden and holds a part-time position as a professor in marketing at BI Norwegian School of Business, Norway.

Per Kristensson is professor at the CTF-Service Research Center, at Karlstad University, Sweden and is a visiting professor at Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen, Norway.

Gary R. Schirr is associate professor of marketing at Radford University.

Lars Witell is a professor at the CTF - Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden and holds a position as professor of business administration at Linkšping University, Sweden.