Innovation is a fundamental driver of organic growth (Coad and Rao 2008) and key to establishing and sustaining competitive advantage (Hunt and Morgan 1996). Despite a lively debate about how exactly innovative firms outperform non-innovators (Calantone, Harmancioglu, and Droge 2010), researchers and practitioners agree that innovation enhances companies' financial performance (e.g., Hult, Hurley, and Knight 2004). Yet most research focuses on goods-related innovation (Droege, Hildebrand, and Forcada 2009), such that service innovation has attracted substantial attention only recently (Ordanini and Parasuraman 2011). The specific characteristics of services, and the traditionally goods-centered business model of many companies, makes it questionable whether findings that derived from goods-based innovation research (Artz et al. 2010) or the analysis of innovation activities in pure business-to-business service companies can be generalized to alternative settings.
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