https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01133098/document

Innovation in services

The service sector accounts for most of the world's economic activity, but it's the least-studied part of the economy. A service system comprises people and technologies that adaptively compute and adjust to a system's changing value of knowledge. A science of service systems could provide theory and practice around service innovation

Steps toward a science of service systems

Service systems are value-co-creation configurations of people, technology, value propositionsconnecting internal and external service systems, and shared information (e.g., language, laws, measures, and methods). Service science is the study of service systems, aiming to create a basis for systematicservice innovation. Service science combines organization and human understanding with business andtechnological understanding to categorize and explain the many types of service systems that exist as wellas how service systems interact and evolve to co-create value. The goal is to apply scientific understandingto advance our ability to design, improve, and scale service systems. To make progress, we think servicedominantlogic provides just the right perspective, vocabulary, and assumptions on which to build a theory ofservice systems, their configurations, and their modes of interaction. Simply put, service-dominant logicmay be the philosophical foundation of service science, and the service system may be its basic theoreticalconstruct.

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Fundamentals of service science

In the unfolding knowledge-based economy, services do matter. But while they are increasingly seen to play a pivotal role in innovation processes, there has been little systematic analysis of this role. This essay presents a four-dimensional model of (services) innovation, that points to the significance of such non-technological factors in innovation as new service concepts, client interfaces and service delivery system. The various roles of service firms in innovation processes are mapped out by identifying five basic service innovation patterns. This framework is used to make an analysis of the role played by knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in innovation. KIBS are seen to function as facilitator, carrier or source of innovation, and through their almost symbiotic relationship with client firms, some KIBS function as co-producers of innovation. It is further argued that, in addition to discrete and tangible forms of knowledge exchange, process-oriented and intangible forms of knowledge flow...

Knowledge-intensive business services as co-producers of innovation

How to address empirically the calculative character of markets without dissolving it? In our paper, we propose a theoretical framework that helps to deal with markets without suspending their calculative properties. In the first section, we construct a broad definition of calculation, grounded on the anthropology of science and techniques. In the next sections, we apply this definition to three constitutive elements of markets: economic goods, economic agents and economic exchanges. First, we examine the question of the calculability of goods: in order to be calculated, goods must be calculable. In the following section, we introduce the notion of calculative distributed agencies to understand how these calculable goods are actually calculated. Thirdly, we consider the rules and material devices that organize the encounter between (and aggregation of) individual supplies and demands, i.e. the specific organizations that allow for a calculated exchange and a market output. Those three elements define conc...

Peripheral Vision Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices

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?

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New modes of innovation: How services benefit industry

The definitions of goods and services have been debated among economists for more than two centuries. This article seeks to consider the definitions currently used from a critical perspective and to offer a new general definition of services that is compatible with the existence of several demand rationales.

The characterization of goods and services: an alternative approach

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 client's and the consultant's 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).

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The Provider-Customer Interface in Business and Professional Services

Services : la productivité en question

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.

Jean Gadrey

Papers

New modes of innovation: How services benefit industry

The characterization of goods and services: an alternative approach

The Provider-Customer Interface in Business and Professional Services

Services : la productivité en question

Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services