Software Service Innovation Model Of Evolution And Empirical Research

Software industry has involved into a new era, which was so-called 'Service Competition Era'. Service innovation has become one of the most important driving force towards development of software enterprise. However, most of the innovation research literatures concern software product development from a view of technology innovation. There are only few scholars discuss software industry innovation from the view of service innovation. The lack of theory on software service innovation has constrained the further development of software service sector. Thus, the author tries to discuss something about software service innovation from its pattern and key success factors, based on a view of enterprise evolution, and do some contribution to promote the innovation of software enterprises.Software service sector is regarded as important component to the knowledge intensive business service (Miles, 1998). Thus, as the base of the entire research, the concept of software service and software service innovation are defined based on knowledge intensive service innovation theory.Afterwards, the fundamental software service innovation pattern is discussed, named ad hoc innovation pattern. According to the theory of ad hoc innovation (Gallouj, 1997), the software service delivering process can be seen as the ad hoc innovation process. Whereas, the ad hoc innovation pattern will not stay the same condition all the time. The characters of ad hot pattern changed along with the evolution of the enterprise. According to the theory of software enterprise evolution, the author summarizes two dimensions to analyse the evolution of ad hoc innovation pattern. These two dimensions are software product customized degree and service packet extent. Based on different stage of ad hoc pattern evolution, three kinds of sub-pattern are identified, 'Total Customization Pattern', 'Re-Exploitation Pattern' and 'Function Configuration Pattern'. And then one case is supplied to prove the evolution path of the software service ad hoc innovation pattern.Based on the above discussion, three typical cases are used to analyse the details on innovation process of three innovation pattern. From the case analysis, the author compares innovation process characters of three innovation pattern and summarize the key success factors under these different pattern. In order to test universality of these factors, Experimental research is taken focusing on the innovation success influencing factors. The questionnaires are sent to 79 software service companies, and theassumption in the thesis is proved by the result of the statistic analysis.At the end of the research, some suggestions are proposed from four different aspects, that is strategic aspect, personnel aspect, technology trajectory aspect, service trajectory aspect and customer aspect. The summary is given, as well as the research prospect of the future.