Towards a Maturity Model for Service Innovation Capabilities: Identifying the Research Imperative

Due to the growing significance of services to modern economies in terms of GDP, employment, growth, and recovery, service innovation has been emerging as an important area in business research, industry, policy, and to academics (Szczygielski, 2011). When successfully managed, service innovation has the potential to grow and enhance individual businesses, the service sector, and the economy as a whole (Aizcorbe et al., 2009). However, innovation research has been historically biased towards manufacturing, resulting in a knowledge deficit regarding our understanding of the capabilities required to effectively manage service innovation within an organisation (Adams et al., 2006). A clear understanding of these capabilities has consequences which facilitate effective service innovation and increase positive returns. In order to accurately measure service innovations and inform targeted improvement initiatives, this project will draw upon and innovatively develop a capability maturity model framework (Wendler, 2012) as a structured way of describing, prescribing, and comparing the innovativeness of service firms (Röglinger et al., 2012). Additionally, the measurement of a company's capabilities on a micro level will be facilitated through integrating the resource-based view to embed improvement processes within their operations (Adams et al., 2006). While maturity model successes have been widely documented; this will be the first model of its kind, developed and tested in practice (Essmann and du Preez, 2010). As such, this project addresses current research gaps and simultaneously approaches the discipline with a novel methodology and serves to complement and significantly upscale existing research in the field.