The Organisation of Innovation in Services

Jonathan E Alltimes (Canterbury Business School University of Kent)

International Journal of Service Industry Management

ISSN: 0956-4233

Article publication date: 1 May 1999

304

Citation

Alltimes, J.E. (1999), "The Organisation of Innovation in Services", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsim.1999.10.2.1.1

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited


This is a timely text that adds new evidence to a much under‐researched area of management. It aims to provide new theory on the organisation and management of innovation in services by extending innovation research on manufacturing firms in relation to those three traditional factors in innovation: strategy, technology development and entrepreneurship. The core of the evidence focuses on two in‐depth case studies of companies in financial services, whilst also including findings from other companies in this industry, as well as less detailed comparisons with tourism, management consultancy, and catering. The book concludes by arguing that a more appropriate focus of explanation for innovation in services is that of entrepreneurship rather than technology development, and that the relationship between top management and other interest groups regulated innovation in services.

Although there is a taxonomy of the theoretical research on innovation, which serious minded managers will find helpful as one way of keying into the now vast literature in this area, it is doubtful whether a coherent explanation of organisation and management specific to the characteristics of services has been achieved. Partly this has to do with the rather narrow definition of technology which has been assumed in the extensive theoretic discussion and partly to do with the above mentioned analytic categories. It also relies on a simple divide between manufacturing industries and service industries, which is plainly not the case as more and more economic research is showing. Project SAPPHO alerted us to the danger, which has been confirmed by more systematic research, that industries are different in the way in which innovation has been organised and managed. So there are no managerial recipes which apply across industries. The same kind of conceptual approach is evident again when devising an approach for systematic case selection which relied on the assumption that there is a one‐to‐one relationship between markets and industries, something which is no longer the case. But in another way this book has contributed to making progress in new syntheses of innovations which stands in the tradition of economic sociology initiated by Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, a feature which is obvious from the wide ranging bibliography.

Finally, the structure of the book is clear and methodological, which is a great help in following through the logic of the research design and argument, but at points the book lacks useful details such as the basis for the statistical tests, which could have been shown in an annex. This may have something to do with the target audience the author had in mind as the book sits a little uneasily between being an exposition for managers and a dissertation for researchers. Furthermore, the expression in places in unclear, which may be due to the fact that the book was issued through the author′s own efforts, and without the services of an established professional publisher, an observation which is confirmed by the rather irritating absence of an index. All in all it makes for unnecessary heavy going for managers, students and researchers alike ‐‐ a lesson in service innovation perhaps.

Related articles