Strategies for achieving success for innovative versus incremental new services

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether managers should have a different approach for the development of very innovative services from that of incremental new services.

This paper is based on a large‐scale survey to examine hotel innovation projects to gain insight about the impact of level of innovativeness on the factors that are linked to new service success and failure.

The research results show that there are two global success factors regardless of their degree of newness – market attractiveness and strategic human resources management. Several other factors, however, are found to influence the outcome of incremental projects, such as: service advantage, empowerment, training of employees, behavior‐based evaluation, tangible quality and marketing synergy. For very innovative new hotel services, market responsiveness and pre‐launch activities are found to be related to success.

Further research should investigate whether the results are applicable to other countries and other service segments as well as to consider a staff or customer outcome perspective.

Managers who design new service development processes that are tied to the key success features in innovative or incremental new service development (NSD) increases the likelihood of success.

The differences in success factors between innovative and incremental new services has not been clearly articulated to date. Innovativeness is linked to levels of risk, ambiguity, necessary resources and complexity and this paper shows that firms should have different priorities and approaches when developing new services.