میزان آمادگی نوآوری خدمات : ابعاد و پیامد عملکرد

This study proposes a higher-order multidimensional construct of service innovation readiness (SIR) based on the organizational change literature and the awareness–motivation–capability perspective. Service innovation is gaining more attention due to its potential value for creating competitive advantage and improving organizational performance. This research conceptualizes SIR to consist of two adopting contexts (i.e., “strategic orientation toward service innovation” and “enabling mechanism of service innovation”) that, together, determine a firm's preparation to adopt organizational changes involved in service innovation. Six dimensions are also identified from a literature review and verified by industry expert interviews to define the two multidimensional adopting contexts. Data collected from 312 Taiwanese firms provide evidence to support the proposed factor structure of SIR and show that SIR positively correlates with SI performance. The findings contribute to the literature by theorizing SIR with a parsimonious structure that captures the complex conditions necessary for adopting service innovation. This study also yields some insight into the management of service innovation by providing managers an assessment that can be used to gauge a firm's status and direct its efforts in continuous improvement.

The world's economic landscape is changing and is characterized, in part, by the fact that services dominate the economies of not only the world's most advanced nations but also many fast-growing and developing countries. For instance, in China, the government has mandated a focus on services growth for the next five years and further into the future, despite that it previously allocated tremendous national energies on manufacturing [13]. In addition, many leading firms have added service to their product offerings and provide total customer solutions. Scholars contend that manufacturing firms should shift toward “solution” and/or “service” offerings to improve their competitiveness in an era of increasing commoditization that characterizes many product markets [95]. That is, companies across different industries are realizing they must compete in service to survive and grow in the future. As companies acknowledge the existence of the challenges, they may also recognize the need to stay innovative in their service offerings so they are prepared for increasing global competition. Notwithstanding the trend, service innovation has remained among the least understood topics in the service management and innovation literature [27], [31] and [51]. The importance of service innovation is highlighted in a recent article that indicates “identifying drivers of sustained new service success” is a prioritized research topic for the science of service [75]. As noted by Jim Spohrer, Director of Service Research at IBM, “people have a good idea of what technological innovation is, but service innovation is more hidden.” [49]. The dearth of insights on how companies can prepare themselves for service innovation is noteworthy when one considers the potential of service innovation to drive revenues and affect people's lives. Hence, it would be a top priority for firms to be able to evaluate their readiness for service innovation prior to considering other issues pertaining to the implementation of service innovation. “Readiness” is not a novel concept in the literature, and a review of the literature reveals a number of prior studies that have investigated individuals' readiness to adopt IT, IS, or technology [57] and [76]. The readiness concept becomes more complicated when an organization, rather than individuals, is the focus of adoption because firm-level readiness for innovation tends to depend on a wide variety of factors. For example, several studies have focused on human, business, and technology resources as organizational readiness factors required for adoption of innovation [56] and [71]. Others give more emphasis to attitude of top management [68], organizational characteristics [26] and [46], or environmental conditions [56]. These studies suggest that research on firm-level readiness can, at best, only provide a partial explanation of the phenomenon and it is difficult to develop a unifying, one-size-fits-all framework of innovation readiness since the framework may be sensitive to the type of innovation and its adoption context. Although one might expect these readiness factors to be equivalently explanatory when applied in the context of service innovation (SI), one should avoid such facile generalization of prior research findings without taking SI characteristics into consideration. In sum, what has been noticeably missing from the literature is a robust framework and instrument to study the factors that affect readiness for service innovation and firm-level empirical evidence to explicate these factors. Against this background, we propose the concept of service innovation readiness (SIR), which signifies a firm's self-assessment of its readiness for effectively implementing service innovation. To our knowledge, no construct in the literature of innovation and service science has fully captured this aspect of service innovation. The purpose of this study, then, is to demarcate the SIR concept and a corresponding framework that can be used for developing an inventory. To accomplish the purpose, the organization change (OC) view [5] and the awareness–motivation–capability model of competitive perspective [19] are used to develop a factor structure for SIR. To more precisely describe the compound structure of SIR with a parsimonious framework, we conceived it as a higher-order composite construct consisting of two multi-dimensional constructs that specify the conditions necessary for building up a firm's readiness for service innovation. We validate this construct and its measurement with a survey of 312 firms in Taiwan. In doing so, this study makes several significant contributions to the extant knowledge of service innovation. First, it addresses an emerging but understudied topic by conceptually and empirically examining the critical managerial dimensions underlying service innovation. By identifying the actionable conditions and mechanism that constitutes a firm's SIR, this study tackles an important issue that has been identified as a top research priority in service science [75]. Second, our conceptualization of SIR as a higher-order formative construct allows this study to delineate what actions and resource of the firm should be attended to and how they can be integrated to enhance service innovation performance. This study validates the conceptualization of SIR with findings in support of the predicted relationship between SIR and its determinants and consequences in a nomological net. Third, being empirically supported as a reliable and valid measure in this study, SIR offers a useful tool for self-diagnosis and a practical guideline that managers can use to create organizational strategies and resources to prepare the firm for adopting service innovation. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section provides an overview of service innovation, and this is followed by a theoretical conceptualization of SIR. Based on literature review, we identify two determining factors of SIR and their corresponding dimensions. In later sections, we report the research methods employed and the empirical validation of the SIR instrument. Finally, we present a discussion of results and their implications, and directions for future work in this area.

Innovation has long been recognized as a key driving force of economies, and innovation in services has just begun to capture attention from industry and academia. Still, despite a growing recognition of its importance, many service innovation initiatives fail or do not sustain to become a competitive advantage. Successful service innovation practices start with a firm's initiation and implementation, and the firm needs to prepare better in order to outperform its competitors. In response to the emerging trend and the lack of a comprehensive framework to capture the resources necessary for service innovation, we propose the SIR concept and define a hierarchical factor structure for this construct. That is, in addition to identifying six dimensions as the basis of the SIR concept, our research shows that the capability to bundle knowledge-based resources is the weapon that a firm has to possess to persist the SI implementation process. It is our hope that this study, as the first attempt to theorize and empirically test the SIR concept, contributes to the emergence of a research stream on service innovation.