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Current Actual Issues on Quality and Services - Selected Papers from 15th QMOD-ICQSS Conference
Edited by Professor Su Mi Dahlgaard Park
Introduction
Competition aims to create superior value for the involved actors. To gain competitive advantages, firms can facilitate service innovation by enabling actors to improve their own use value. That is, innovations often stem from a novel or improved way to use existing resources to co-create value, though in some cases, innovations also are based on new resources or new technologies in systems that are capable of creating service. These service systems constitute the basic context and enabler of value co-creation and thus the foundation for service innovation. The customer co-creates and determines the value of service innovation, while the company usually is responsible for the value proposition and facilitating the value creation process ([20] Lusch et al. , 2007). Yet to understand the role of the service system in service innovation, we also must look at how structures, such as resources and schemas (rules and norms), co-exist and interact. To advance service innovation, the involved actors must apply the structures in new ways.
Thus, far though, innovation has tended to be conceptualized according to a goods-dominant (G-D) logic ([35] Vargo and Lusch, 2004) and in distinct, sequenced steps. Service innovation instead is a complex, often incremental, less radical, and informal process ([17] Johne and Storey, 1998; [18] Kelly and Storey, 2000). Its nature distinguishes the service innovation process ([1] Alam, 2002; [21] Magnusson, 2009), such that human resources and collaboration are more important than they are for product innovation. More attention thus must be devoted to structures in the service system. In contrast, innovation research often treats services as a special category of products, or as "what goods are not" ([22] Michel et al. , 2008; [36] Vargo and Lusch, 2006). In the G-D logic, service offerings are designed with value. In contrast, we propose using the service-dominant (S-D) logic to create a new conceptualization in which service offers a unique perspective on value creation.
The S-D logic suggests that value is always co-created with the customer through the activation of sets of resources. Service companies accordingly need to design resource integration mechanisms within the service system that support customers and other...