Three Essays on Service Innovation and New Service Development

The importance of service sector has grown significantly over the past three decades as services dominate the majority of GDP in most advanced economies and even countries that historically focused on manufacturing are now growing rapidly in services. Meanwhile, service innovation has been regarded as "the next big thing", but the majority of innovation research still focuses on innovation in manufacturing. There is a scarcity of empirical studies to address the differences between service innovation and manufacturing innovation and to focus on service innovation and new service development activities. This thesis is an effort to remedy that deficiency by empirically addressing several major issues about service innovation with three studies, based on organizational-level data collected from 686 service companies and 1646 manufacturing companies and project-level data of new service development projects collected from a large multi-units service company in China.;In Study 1, the impact of customer orientation on service innovation and manufacturing innovation has been empirically investigated and compared through the theoretical lens of service-dominant logic and resource-based view. This study mainly addresses two research questions: 1) Does customer orientation positively relate to both service and product innovativeness and how does this effect differ between service and manufacturing firms? 2) Do supplier collaboration and technological capability mediate the relationship between customer orientation and service/product innovativeness differently in service firms and manufacturing firms? By empirically addressing these two research questions, this study contributes to the literature on service versus manufacturing innovation and service-dominant logic, and provides some managerial implications for decision makers in both manufacturing firms and service firms.;Study 2 builds on and extends extant service innovation research by investigating 70 new service development (NSD) projects of a large mobile telecom firm in China. This study first seeks to validate an existing taxonomy of service innovation, and then seeks to extend the taxonomy, grounded on the empirical research findings. Finally this study develops propositions concerning service innovation types and provides preliminary empirical investigation. Results from the analyses contribute to the literature on the taxonomy of service innovation and provide insightful implications as how to manage the NSD activities in the network environment.;Study 3 is a follow-up study of the second study. This study uses a multiple-cases research design to study the deployment of service innovations in a large organization. Three important research questions are addressed: 1) what are the organizational factors leading to successful deployment of innovations? 2) How does the type of service innovation influence the deployment and how should different types of innovation be deployed accordingly? 3) How does the change of development and/or deployment team influence the deployment of innovations? 10 cases out of the 70 service innovations covered in Study 2 are selected and a longitudinal case-study approach is employed. This study contributes to literature of service innovation deployment and provides managerial implications for managers in service firms, especially those large service firms with multiple units or subsidiaries.;Keywords: Service Innovation, Manufacturing Innovation, New Service Development, Customer Orientation, Service-dominant Logic, Case Study, Empirical Research.