Contemporary Issues and Critical Challenges on Innovation in Services

Abstract

The landscape of services and the increasing speed of changes in the service domain have created ever‐increasing opportunities for service innovation. These opportunities arise from greater competition, changes in customer expectations, their willingness to participate in service innovation, and the demand for more personalised and customized (digital) services (cf. Aguirre et al., 2016). To enjoy these opportunities, many managers in service firms have changed their service processes and products and invested heavily in internal systems and processes to foster creativity and staff engagement and external collaboration with business partners, made greater use of (big) data to learn about customers’ needs and preferences (cf., Villarroel Ordenes et al., 2018), and changing service delivery processes.