The Promoting Force of Technology for Service Innovation in High-Tech Industries

摘要

This article focuses on the interaction between the development of technology and service innovation. It goes “back to the basics” by analyzing the first theoretical contributions to the service innovation literature from the late 1980s. These contributions were heavily technologically oriented: they aimed at bringing the results of technological innovation to the realm of services. More specifically, we focus on the model of “reverse innovation cycle” on one hand, and on the first innovation-specific categorization of services on the other. The latter introduced the division into supplier-dominated, production-intensive/scale-intensive, and science-based services. Our purpose is to examine in which ways these theoretical approaches could promote our understanding about the new phenomena of technology-service interaction in innovation. In the second part of the article, we apply these approaches in five case studies that originate from different service industries and that differ in size and technologies. The findings of the analysis demonstrate that the applicability of the approaches to the case studies depends on several factors including the kind of technology involved in the innovation activities, the stage of development of this technology, and the type of service.