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Increased interest in service development
Given the increasing importance of the service sector in western economies, not enough research has been carried out in the field of new service development (de Bretani, 1993a; Edvardsson and Olsson, 1996; Harvey, 1992; Shtack, 1981, 1984). Only recently has this area been focused on more intensively (de Bretani and Cooper, 1992; Mattsson, 1992).
Drawing from the research stream of new product development and using a comparative methodology of analysing successes and failures, some answers as to what drives success in developing new services have been suggested (Cooper and de Bretani, 1991). For instance, because of the lesser need for large capital investment in production facilities, the speed of imitation, and the threat of new competition, it has been suggested that service providers should speed up their development processes. Apart from market synergy, which has been identified as a key success criterion, the organizational factor and effective market research have emerged as the second and third most important success factors (de Brentani, 1989). Some evidence suggests that there is considerable inertia in service organizations. Changes are needed in structures and strategy to facilitate new service development (Scheuing and Johnson, 1989). In studies of services management in general, quality has become a central concept. Many quality problems are recurrent and may to a great extent be seen as results of shortcomings in the development processes of new services. Crosby (1989) argues that 70-90 per cent of all quality problems are repetitive and built into the processes. A conclusion of this is that quality should be designed in during the service development processes (Edvardsson, 1993; Juran, 1992).
Research analysing differences between developing services and products (Martin and Horne, 1992, 1994) has shown that customer participation and the use of customer information is more common in product development than in service development. Technical research personnel are more involved in product development, while on the other hand senior management has greater input in service development. Results from this research support the view that development of new services is more formally organized than the development of new products.
During the last two decades different views have been put forward on the descriptive question of how new services are planned and on the normative question of...