Tadhg Blommerde
Waterford Institute of Technology
Blommerde, T. and Lynch, P. (2014) 'Dynamic Capabilities for Managing Service Innovation: Towards a Conceptual Framework', Paper presented at the Irish Academy of Management, 3-5 September, Limerick, Ireland.Blommerde, T. and Lynch, P. (2013) 'Towards a Conceptualisation of a Service Innovation Maturity Model', Paper presented at the Irish Academy of Management, 2-4 September, Waterford, Ireland.Lynch, P., Power, J., Hussey, J. and Blommerde, T. (2013) 'Reimagining Ireland's Innovation Landscape to Realise the Potential of Service Innovation', Paper presented at the Irish Academy of Management, Waterford, Ireland: 2-4 September.
Aim/research question
This paper presents a conceptualisation of service innovation capability maturity and describes a procedure for developing and validating an instrument for its assessment.
Background and rationale
While the provision of novel services is widely accepted as a source of competitive advantage (Vargo and Lusch, 2004), the attention of practitioners and academics has in recent years turned to the ability to generate outputs of this type, labelled service innovation capability (Lillis et al., 2015). This describes the capacity to deploy resources to develop and improve services in response to changes in the operating environment (Pöppelbuß et al., 2011). However, in contrast with its stated importance and links to performance (Omar et al., 2016), “a significant gap exists in our knowledge of service firm innovation capability” (Hogan et al., 2011: 1264). Unfortunately this situation has not improved since the foregoing statement was made and presently only a small number of flawed measures exist (Nada and Ali, 2015).
Undoubtedly part of this problem is that inadequate procedures have been employed in the construction these measures (Hogan et al., 2011), which notably have failed to discuss the development of appropriate conceptual definitions (MacKenzie et al., 2011). This is evident from instruments that measure service innovation capability unidimensionally, despite the prevailing view in the discipline that it is a multidimensional construct (Grawe et al., 2009). Indeed, service innovation capability is generally assessed only by its outcomes, rather than components, through methods that do not adhere to any guidelines at all (Tang et al., 2015). Critically, these neglect to examine the maturity, or sophistication with which this key capability is executed, and provide no directions for its enhancement. As a consequence, firms have no understanding of where their capability is suffering or how to upgrade their innovative maturity mode (Hipp and Grupp, 2005).
Therefore, the purpose of this research is remove confusion by detailing a procedure through which a suitable measure of service innovation capability maturity can be developed.
Methodology
It describes the methodological process required to achieve this, following the comprehensive sequence of steps advanced by MacKenzie et al. (2011), and measuring its maturity through that of its 4 dimensions, User Involvement, Knowledge Management, Strategising, and Networking (Blommerde and Lynch, 2014). As these components are not caused by service innovation capability, but rather cause this construct, a formative approach is necessitated, a technique that differs significantly from conventional scale development (Diamantopoulos and Winklhofer, 2001).
Key results and contributions
To this point, the survey instrument emerging from this procedure has been endorsed by academic experts for content validity and evaluated and confirmed through a pre-test with 8 practitioners. The following stages require additional data to be collected and for empirical indicator and construct validation to occur. The key contributions of this paper are its description of the conceptual and methodological processes underlying the development of a measure for service innovation capability maturity. Of particular significance are its application of formative techniques and guidelines for the utilisation of this approach.
A_Procedure_for_Measuring_and_Validating_a_Construct_of_Service_Innovation_Capability_Maturity.pdf 