Jean Gadrey

New modes of innovation: How services benefit industry

Despite the significance of services in the economic statistics, economic theories of innovation have tended to ignore them, or to assume that innovation in services consists of little more than adopting innovations developed in industry. This view is subjected to a critique based on three questions: (1) why is innovation in services misunderstood or neglected in economic theory? (2) what do field observations indicate are the principal forms of innovation in services? (3) how can these observations help to broaden and enrich the economic theory of industrial innovation?

The Provider-Customer Interface in Business and Professional Services

On the basis of several national an international studies in the field of business and professional services the aim of this paper is to reconsider the core question of provider-customer interface. It first shows that the question of the relationships between internal and external business services may not only be posed in terms of subtitution but also in terms of complementarity and interaction. It then analysis the interface as a moment of truth (ie as a process of interaction, as a form of organization, and as part of both the clients and the consultants value chain) a moment of trust (based upon various modes of interaction and various logics of interface) and a moment of thrust (thanks to innovation).

Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services

Written by some of the most distinguished authors in the field, this book elucidates the critical and complex relationships between services, production and innovation. The authors discuss the limitations of current theories to explain service productivity and innovation, and call for a conceptual re-working of the ways in which these are measured. They also highlight the important role of knowledge in the production system and in doing so make an important contribution to a key debate which has emerged in the social sciences in recent years.