Marc Kohler

Customer Integration in Service Innovation: An Exploratory Study

Prominent industry projects, as well as an extensive literature suggest the importance of customer integration for companies’ innovation success. This appears to be especially true for service firms, which inherently build on customer interaction. Despite this appreciation of the approach, there are comparably few empirical analyses of the positive and negative effects of customer integration. In this exploratory study, we build on established customer role concepts to study the status quo of customer integration in industry, as well as reservations against the roles and negative experiences from customer integration projects. The study reveals a gap between reservations and actual negative experiences in losing know-how, as well as a positive effect of experience in customer integration on perceived benefits for the company.

Service Innovation Capabilities for Idea Assessment: An Appraisal of Established and Novel Approaches

The importance of innovation for companies to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged. While earlier studies have emphasised the critical importance of idea assessment as part of the new product and new services development process, the topic has been under-represented in academic research recently. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview on the depiction of idea assessment in services research. For this, we start by exploring the representation of the topic in question in recent service innovation capability frameworks. On a more operational level we reflect service-related publications on criteria, information sources, group compositions and approaches for idea assessment. Finally, by reporting on a case study with a German financial services provider, we introduce serious games and enterprise crowdfunding as two novel approaches for assessing service ideas. Overall, we find that internal, service providing staff should play a major role in the assessment of service ideas. Surprisingly, classical portfolio management approaches making use of deliberation in small management boards seem to be the predominant method discussed in the literature and applied in practice. Mechanisms which are designed to involve larger crowds into idea assessment exist, however, are not yet widespread. The two novel approaches show promising avenues for involving service providing staff into idea assessment in a motivating way.

Service Innovation Analytics: Towards an Approach for Validating Frameworks for Service Innovation Capabilities via Text Mining

The importance of innovation for companies to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged. Realizing service innovations has shown to provide some particular challenges to organizations. Consequently, in recent years, several frameworks of capabilities for service innovation have been published; however, often not yet validated. Conventional empirical validation approaches are time and resource intense. In this research-in-progress paper we aim for indications that text mining can be applied to companies’ documents written in natural language so that frameworks for service innovation capabilities can be validated. Building on established methods in text mining, we are working towards an approach to realize this. The paper outlines the approach and reports on the encouraging results from an exploratory study, which we have conducted by applying the approach to a single capability from a prominently discussed service innovation capability framework.

Service Innovation Analytics: Leveraging Existing Unstructured Data to Assess Service Innovation Capability

The importance of innovation for firms for gaining competitive advantage has been widely acknowledged. Innovation in services exhibits some particular challenges. In order to support formal service innovation management, several frameworks of capabilities for service innovation have been published in recent years. However, these frameworks often do not support the use of existing information to apply them to a firms context and to guide managerial decisions. In this paper the authors aim to show that a firms service innovation capability can be operationally diagnosed with the help of such a framework in a more concrete way, using existing unstructured data. Building on established methods in text mining, the authors are working towards an approach to realise this. The paper outlines the approach and presents the encouraging results from our exploratory study, as well as avenues for further development of the approach and its implementation in a management information system.

An Integrated Dynamic Capability Model for Service Innovation Management

Der Dynamic Capability View ist einer der vielversprechendsten Ansatze, um Innovation und Wettbewerbsvorteile von Unternehmen zu untersuchen. Aus diesem Ansatz heraus hat sich eine Forschungsstromung mit Fokus auf Dynamic Capabilities fur Dienstleistungsinnovation entwickelt. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es, die existierende Wissensbasis zu erweitern und Dynamic Capabilities in einem Dienstleistungskontext empirisch zu untersuchen. Mittels drei vorbereitender Analysen erforschen wir das Dynamic Capabilities Konstrukt bezogen auf wissensintensive Dienstleistungen, zusammen mit den zugrunde liegenden Basisfahigkeiten und den resultierenden Erfolgsgrosen. Wir prasentieren ein Modell, das Dynamic Capabilities fur Dienstleistungsinnovation und ihre wichtigsten Bezugsgrosen integriert. Die Dynamic Capabilities werden durch die Konstrukte Sensing, Seizing und Reconfiguring operationalisiert. Um ein umfassendes Bild der zugrunde liegenden Basisfahigkeiten zu gewinnen betrachten wir diese auf mehreren Ebenen – Mitarbeiter, Unternehmen und Netzwerk. Aus einer fragebogenbasierten Umfrage unter Fuhrungskraften von Unternehmen, die wissensintensive Dienstleistungen anbieten, erhalten wir 148 Antworten. Diese Daten werden genutzt um das Strukturgleichungsmodell auszuwerten und die vorgeschlagenen Hypothesen zu testen. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die einzelnen Basisfahigkeiten spezifische Effekte auf die Dynamic Capabilities haben. Das Konstrukt Wissensaustausch und Lernen stellt sich als zentral heraus, da es einen signifikanten Einfluss auf alle drei Dynamic Capabilities hat. Daruber hinaus finden wir sowohl direkte als auch indirekte Einflusse der Dynamic Capabilities auf Erfolgsgrosen auf Unternehmensebene – insbesondere von Seiten der Seizing Capability. Die Ergebnisse tragen zum Fortschritt des Forschungsfeldes bei, indem wir die existierenden Konstrukte fur die empirische Messung von Dynamic Capabilities und ihrer Beziehungen weiterentwickeln. Fuhrungskrafte konnen die Ergebnisse nutzen um Investitionen in die Dynamic Capabilities ihrer Unternehmen und ihre Ansatze zur Leistungsmessung von Dienstleistungsinnovation zu uberprufen.