A Maturity Matrix for Assessing Service Innovation Capability

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector must consistently and continuously innovate and adapt to ensure their survival (Gebauer et al., 2012). Achieving this depends on their service innovation capability, which describes the capacity to deploy resources to develop and improve services (Giannopoulou et al., 2011). Despite its significance, the literature lacks practical measurement or management tools, the omission of which ensure the economic benefits of service innovation will never be fully realised within Irish SMEs (Kohler et al., 2013). In an attempt to eliminate much of this ambiguity, this paper provides a substantial academic and practical contribution by rigorously developing the foundation of a staged model to measure its maturity. The proposed matrix extends existing maturity models through its application in the services sector and represents an important step towards understanding the evolution of the constituent dimensions of service innovation capability.