In this article, we offer a broadened view of service innovation—one grounded in service-dominant logic—that transcends the tangible–intangible and producer–consumer divides that have plagued extant research in this area. Such a broadened conceptualization of service innovation emphasizes (1) innovation as a collaborative process occurring in an actor-to-actor (A2A) network, (2) service as the application of specialized competences for the benefit of another actor or the self and as the basis of all exchange, (3) the generativity unleashed by increasing resource liquefaction and resource density, and (4) resource integration as the fundamental way to innovate. Building on these core themes, we offer a tripartite framework of service innovation: (1) service ecosystems, as emergent A2A structures actors create and recreate through their effectual actions and which offer an organizing logic for the actors to exchange service and cocreate value; (2) service platforms, which enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of service exchange by liquefying resources and increasing resource density (facilitating easy access to appropriate resource bundles) and thereby serve as the venue for innovation; and (3) value cocreation, which views value as cocreated by the service offer(er) and the service beneficiary (e.g., customer) through resource integration and indicate the need for mechanisms to support the underlying roles and processes. In discussing these components, we consider the role of information technology—both as an operand resource and as an operant resource—and then examine the implications for research and practice in digitally enabled service innovation.
Baskerville and Myers (2002) recently suggested that the information systems (IS) field has "come of age" and that it can now serve as a reference discipline for other fields. In this article, the discourse about their vision is extended by considering the potential for the IS field to contribute to new product development (NPD) research. It is argued that the rapid infusion of information technology (IT) along four dimensions of product development--process management, project management, information and knowledge management, and collaboration and communication--raises several important NPD research issues. These issues could be addressed by drawing from extant theories and models in the IS field. By employing NPD as the context, other issues that underlie the new role envisioned for the IS field are also identified.
This article comments on a study looking at the value of information technology employees outside of the IT department and how they contribute to the health of companies in many ways. The authors of the study believe that IT professionals are often overlooked as sources of innovation in companies and look at organizational mechanisms which have an impact on the propensity to innovate in IT. They studied several aspects of IT including planning, advisory boards, customer support units and more. Using evidence from both a Delphi study of a group of senior managers and a field study of three medium-sized organizations, the authors demonstrated that all but the first of their 14 named mechanisms have statistically discernible impacts on innovation.