Paul H. Driessen

Consumer perceptions of service constellations: implications for service innovation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the service constellation perspective affects innovation strategies and potentially contributes to the innovation literature, proposing a research agenda.Design/methodology/approach – By analyzing the notion of a service constellation, the authors provide an overview of major implications for service innovation research and practice.Findings – Firms and service innovation researchers need to focus on the perceived consumer value of the constellation rather than on individual services. The authors illustrate how service innovation from the constellation perspective requires coordination and synchronization between projects and different approaches to portfolio management and screening.Originality/value – Adoption of the service constellation perspective creates new opportunities.

Green New Product Development: The Pivotal Role of Product Greenness

This study aims to develop an integrative framework for green new product development (NPD) based on the existing literature and to empirically study the applicability of that integrative framework. This study answers three calls: for research that is rooted in a traditional NPD perspective, for research that integrates marketing aspects in a model of green NPD, and for research that acknowledges variations in greenness. The results from eight case studies in two industries (i.e., the chemical and food industries) substantiate the integrative framework and suggest that it provides a good basis for understanding green NPD. The study demonstrates that green NPD is not fundamentally different from traditional NPD but does contain features and underlying mechanisms that reflect the increased complexity of green NPD. The framework incorporates the targeting and positioning of green product innovations, thus establishing itself as a holistic framework. Most importantly, the study shows how greenness plays a pivotal role in tying the various elements of the framework together. The realized greenness of a new product is a central concept that helps managers understand complex relationships among industry type, green targeting, and green positioning.

Antecedents of Market Orientation in Semi-Public Service Organizations: A Study of Dutch Housing Associations

The purpose of this study is to explain which factors affect the market orientation of semi-public service organizations in their transition from public to private. Change capacity and interdepartmental and organizational system factors are hypothesized to affect market orientation, which is operationalized in behavioural and cultural dimensions. Results of a survey among top-level executives of Dutch housing associations show that interdepartmental and organizational system factors have a significant effect. The most important antecedents, however, are two change capacity factors: process improvement control and top management emphasis. This suggests that change capacity is crucial for understanding market orientation in many service industries.

How Do Stakeholders Matter in Product Innovation

This study investigates how stakeholder orientation affects product innovation and takes the incorporation of green (ecological) issues as a specific context to study this question. The authors borrow insights from three streams of literature: (1) insights from stakeholder theory, combined with (2) parallel developments in the market orientation literature, and (3) findings from environmental management research. Based on these three streams of literature, the authors develop a theoretical model of how stakeholder orientation impacts the inclusion of green issues in product development, en route to innovation performance. Stakeholder orientation reflects the (1) systematic gathering of information on stakeholders, (2) the systematic analysis of the information for the purpose of developing stakeholder knowledge, and (3) the systematic use of such knowledge to guide strategy development and implementation (Greenley and Foxall 1998; Maignan and Ferrell 2004). Following insights from stakeholder theory and market orientation, the authors propose that stakeholder orientation should be thought of as having both width (number of different stakeholder groups) and depth (better understanding of future interests).