Sectoral Heterogeneity in New Service Development: An Exploratory Study of Service Types and Success Factors

The service industry is of fundamental relevance for the economies of industrialized countries, as the service industry produces the highest growth in the gross domestic product. In this regard, new service development (NSD) represents a critical resource for competitive survival and a decisive factor of growth in the service industry. However, service firms across many industries are increasingly faced with the challenge of determining how best to manage their development of new service offerings. Although researchers have shown growing interest in NSD issues, this area is still underutilized. Furthermore, although the heterogeneity of the service industry has been emphasized for years, the current body of research on NSD mainly focuses on specific service environments, providing data that are often not comparable across different service sectors. Additionally, there is no study to date that comprehensively examines innovation activities and the relevance of service innovations’ success factors within different service industries. The aim of this exploratory study is to establish a more balanced picture of the nature of innovation activities in terms of NSD characteristics and success factors in the heterogeneous service industry. From this perspective, this paper begins with an examination of the factors that contribute to the success of NSD. Based on a meta‐analysis of new service success factor studies, 17 different success determinants are classified and aggregated to service‐related success determinants. Subsequently, a cluster analysis of 1016 service companies is used to identify different service innovation types. For the service sector, four service innovation types are determined: efficient developers, innovative developers, interactive adopters, and standardized adopters. Furthermore, based on interviews with service innovation managers, the previously identified success factors are examined for each innovation type using a standardized survey. Finally, based on the results of this exploratory study, the paper concludes with recommendations for NSD management and research propositions for each service innovation type. These propositions support innovation managers to successfully manage service innovations for the innovation type they are operating in.     

Customer Involvement in New Service Development: An Examination of Antecedents and Outcomes*

Customer involvement has been recognized as an important factor for successful service development. Despite its acknowledged importance, a review of the literature suggests that there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness and outcomes of interacting with customers while developing new services. Similarly, the extant literature shows mixed views about the effect of technological uncertainty on customer involvement and the effectiveness of customer involvement at different stages of the new service development process. Against this backdrop, the present study has three objectives: (1) to investigate the effects of customer involvement on operational dimensions (i.e., innovation speed and technical quality) and market dimensions (i.e., competitive superiority and sales performance) of new service performance; (2) to examine the effect of technological novelty and technological turbulence on customer involvement; and (3) to explore the moderating effect of the stage of the development process on the relationships among technological novelty, technological turbulence and customer involvement, and customer involvement and new service performance. A total of 807 firms with 75 or more employees in a varied set of industries were selected from the Dun & Bradstreet's 2004 listing of Spanish service firms. A questionnaire was mailed to the person in charge of new service development at each company. A total of 102 complete questionnaires were returned. Findings reveal that whereas customer involvement has a positive direct effect on technical quality and innovation speed, it has an indirect effect on competitive superiority and sales performance through both technical quality and innovation speed. The study also finds a positive effect of technological novelty as well as technological turbulence on customer involvement. Contrary to expectations, the study does not find any moderating effects of the stage of the development process. This study has several theoretical and managerial implications. In terms of theoretical implications, the study supports the role of technological uncertainty (novelty and turbulence) as an antecedent to customer involvement. It also provides empirical evidence of the impact of customer involvement on operational and market dimensions of new service performance. In terms of managerial implications, the study offers critical insights on how customer involvement in new service development translates into improved new service performance. Furthermore, it reveals that the importance of customer involvement in technologically uncertain contexts and its impact on new service performance are independent of the stage of the development process, suggesting that managers should involve customers throughout the entire development process.     

服务外包动因机制分析及发展趋势预测 --美国服务外包的验证

20世纪90年代以来，随着信息技术的迅速发展，许多企业都把非核心服务活动交给外部企业执行，服务外包得到蓬勃发展。本文以美国服务外包情况为例，依据投入产出表和其他相关数据对服务外包的发展动因、影响服务外包各种力量的强弱，以及对服务外包的发展趋势进行实证分析和预测，以期对服务外包内在变动机制进行详细而较为全面的研究和阐释。     

New Product Development For Service Companies

It is well known that services differ from manufactured goods in a number of significant ways. Services are largely intangible, produced and consumed simultaneously, heterogeneous and perishable. These differences can lead to changes in service management. Christopher J. Easingwood has investigated how new products development practices in service organizations may reflect these differences. He has profiled practices found in a sample of service companies in the United Kingdom on topics ranging from idea generation to post-launch assessment, together with the strategic role and organizational location of new products. A number of special characteristics of the new product activity in services companies are identified. For instance, the number of new product introductions may be restricted due to customer and staff confusion when faced with a proliferation of service products. Test markets are used primarily to ensure the proper functioning of the service rather than to provide a base for a national sales projection. These and other characteristics appear to be appropriate adaptations to the special features of services. They are part of a pattern that shows some of the ways that service companies have adapted the new product development process to meet unique problems in the service environment.     

新BP公司的发展目标及其战略

近年BP公司先后成功收购了阿莫料、阿科和Castrol，公司的全球竞争力大大提高。文章对新BP公司整体和各业务部门的发展目标和发展战略进行了深入地剖析，对改革中的中国石油石化公司具有一定的借鉴意义。     

天津市生产性服务业发展现状与制约因素分析

近年来,作为现代服务业核心的生产性服务业得到迅猛发展,已经成为我国经济新的增长点.理论界对生产性服务的研究方兴未艾.但是,也应该看到,生产性服务业有发展不平衡、对地方经济辐射力不够等诸多问题,本文通过对比交通运输、仓储、和邮政业等五大主要生产性服务业的发展现状,获得经验,并对天律生产服务业的优化发展提出设想.     

Consequences of New Product Development Speed: A Meta‐Analysis

Five meta‐analyses previously have been published on the topic of new product development involving the concept of new product development speed. Three of these studies have investigated antecedents to new product development success, of which just one was new product development speed. The other two studies used new product development speed as the dependent variable, and analyzed antecedents to achieving speed. This article extends previous empirical generalizations in this domain by using a meta‐analytic methodology to understand the link between new product development speed and new product success at a more granular level. Specifically, it considers the relationship with different dimensions of success as measured overall or compositely, operationally (i.e., the process measures of decreasing development costs and proficiently managing market entry timing and the product measures of technical product performance and product competitive advantage), and relative to external success outcomes (i.e., customer based and financial success). While the results indicate that, in general, new product development speed is associated with improving success outcomes, those relationships may diminish or even disappear depending upon a number of methodological design decisions and research contexts. A subsequent meta‐analysis of the antecedents of development speed provides a more holistic picture of development speed. These results are broadly consistent with those produced by another recent meta‐analytic investigation of the issue. Together, these findings have important implications for academics pursuing further research in this domain, as well as for managers considering implementing a program to increase new product development speed.     

Growth and Development of a Body of Knowledge: 16 Years of New Product Development Research, 1989–2004*

In this study, a content analysis was performed on 815 articles focused on new product development (NPD) published in 10 selected leading marketing, management, NPD, and research and development (R&D) journals from 1989 to 2004. Journals selected were a combination of leading journals in the discipline and publications that included NPD articles. NPD articles were classified by a series of key attributes including methodology employed, domains of knowledge utilized, and broad topics explored. The resulting data were then studied to discern trends over time or common characteristics within domains, methodologies, or journals. The study of NPD has grown since the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) was launched in 1984. This study shows strong growth in the number of articles on NPD in each category of journal selected. The research in the articles has changed: The early focus on a few selected success factors or a staged development process has evolved and broadened over the 16‐year period. More variables and more sophisticated models are being studied in NPD articles. The study found a continuing evolution in research topics and increased sophistication in quantitative techniques over the 16‐year period. Overall this review of the NPD literature uncovers encouraging signs of a maturing discipline. However, there are concerns about continuing issues in methodology, insufficient study of service innovation, and continued focus on process characteristics instead of other antecedents of NPD success. The service sector seems to be understudied, even as the reality of a service economy is generally acknowledged. The call in a recent meta‐analysis to focus more on market and product characteristics and less on process characteristics has not yet been heeded, even by marketing researchers.     

PERSPECTIVE: An Analysis of 22 Years of Research in JPIM*

Numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) since its inception in 1984, representing the most advanced studies dedicated to the management practice in all of the functions involved in the total process of product innovation. It is timely to draw a research profile by investigating the research patterns and development in JPIM to reflect the evolution of the field. First of all, the present study performed a text analysis of 544 research articles published from 1984 to 2005 and then developed a list of research streams. Next, each article was analyzed by coding the following information: the author's background (i.e., academic or professional), the author's country of affiliation, the research topic, the structure of theoretical framework (i.e., analog, composite, or propositional), the type of research design, the quantitative analytical technique, the types of industries, and the countries investigated in the empirical studies. The results indicated that JPIM had made substantial progress in two points. The first is the expanded collaborations of authors, which are not only within the national boundary but also across countries and continents. With such a divergence of research traditions and cultural perspectives, this cooperation offers the potential to enrich the stock of new product development and innovation management theories as well as methodologies more than single‐country arrangement. The second is a high degree of science in respect of methodology. Although JPIM has become a major journal for business research, three opportunities of knowledge advancement were suggested. The first is to reduce the domination of American and European publication and to promote article submission from developing countries. The second concerns the need of relatively broad theoretical schema and diversified research methods. The last opportunity lies in the encouragement of research on certain promising topics.     

Nine Years of New Labour: Neoliberalism and Workers’ Rights

Since it was first elected in 1997, a large Commons majority won in three general elections and a benign economic environment have combined to give New Labour the authority and opportunity to implement its programme for industrial relations and employment law. This paper offers an appraisal of New Labour’s neoliberalism, and its relevance for understanding the scope and limits of its reform of employment law. The conclusion calls for a campaign to restore and extend trade union rights as a prerequisite for safeguarding workers’ interests within the labour market, employment relationship and society.     

新服务开发的发展趋势研究

新服务开发已成为企业和社会关注的焦点,与企业的热情相对照,实践中新服务开发的效果却令很多企业失望。文章对新服务开发的发展趋势进行探讨,以期为企业提供实践的参考方向。     

Pioneering Advantage in New Service Development: A Multi-Country Study of Managerial Perceptions

Pioneering advantage in manufacturing firms has received much attention in the management and marketing literature. Few research studies, however, have been conducted to investigate the pioneering advantages and disadvantages involved in new service development, especially across several geographic regions. We build a theoretical framework of pioneering advantage in service industries based on the distinguishing characteristics of services. From this framework, we develop a set of testable propositions about the importance of several types of pioneering advantage (economic, preemptive, technological, and behavioral advantages) to service managers. Specifically, we propose that all of these types of pioneering advantages are important to service managers, and that these managers perceive that pioneering results in improved firm performance. We also propose that, due to the distinguishing characteristics of services such as intangibility and heterogeneity, service managers will not perceive the risks of pioneering in a service industry to be severe. In addition, we propose that certain types of pioneering advantage will be more important to service managers in Western countries than in Asian Pacific countries due to cultural and business environmental differences. In particular, we propose that service managers from Western firms perceive preemptive advantages of pioneering to be more important than do their Asian Pacific counterparts, and service managers from Asian Pacific firms perceive behavioral advantages of pioneering to be more important than do their Western counterparts. To test our propositions empirically, we develop a set of pioneering principles from the literature. We then collect and analyze data from a sample of 982 senior managers in service industries from nine countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong,1 South Korea, and Singapore. We find evidence of several significant cross‐cultural differences consistent with our propositions. In fact, seven of the eight propositions are strongly or partially supported. The only nonsupported proposition concerned the importance of technological advantage. We find that technological advantages of pioneering are much less important to service managers than are other pioneering advantages. We conclude with strategic recommendations for managers involved in new service development and international or global competition, and provide directions for future research. We note that the insights from this study can help managers from both the West and the Asian Pacific region to better understand their global competitors who pursue a new service pioneering strategy, and can potentially help them select entry deterrence strategies more effectively.     

A Comparison of New Service versus New Product Development: Configurations of Collaborative Intensity as Predictors of Performance

Collaboration among firms for innovation has received considerable attention. However, little is known about how firm‐to‐firm collaboration is configured in new service development (NSD) versus new product development (NPD). This study takes a multidimensional approach and measures firm‐to‐firm collaboration on different intensity dimensions of (1) processes (mutual communication, joint engagement, sharing responsibilities) and (2) ownership (relationship commitment and mutual trust). By showing that the phenomenon of collaboration is multifaceted, this study is able to knit a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of the differences between NSD and NPD success as the result of different patterns of collaboration. Specifically, it utilizes survey data collected from 194 alliances to substantiate how NSD and NPD differ on these collaborative dimensions and then explores their impact on NSD versus NPD performance. The findings suggest that collaboration between firms in NSD is configured and works differently than collaboration between firms in NPD. The results further show that there is a stronger, positive relationship of intensity levels of joint engagement among firms involved in product development and performance than when a new service is developed. However, the intensity of mutual trust has a stronger, positive relationship with development performance when a new service is developed than when a new product is developed. Implications are discussed, and suggestions for future research are given.     

钢铁工业与现代服务业融合发展的案例分析

简要叙述了钢铁工业与现代服务业开展“两业融合”的重要意义,分别以宝钢、河钢为代表的国内钢铁企业和以浦项、蒂森克虏伯为代表的国外钢铁企业为例,对钢铁企业开展两业融合的做法进行了分析,最后针对两业融合发展提出了几点建议。     

Enhancing New Product Development Performance: An Organizational Learning Perspective

Several years ago, an editorial in a software industry journal asked readers, “Why aren’t they using all those marvelous methods?” The focus of the editorial was on software engineering methods, but the question also applies to the broader realm of new product development (NPD). Proven tools exist for gathering, disseminating, and using market information. But despite widespread recognition of the important role that market knowledge plays in NPD, most firms fail to employ these tools in a consistent manner.Marjorie E. Adams, George S. Day, and Deborah Dougherty contend that the tools for successful NPD cannot be implemented successfully until we understand the barriers that hinder an organization’s capabilities for learning about markets. To foster that understanding, they describe the results of a study that explores the organizational barriers to learning about markets for new products. The study examines 40 NPD efforts in 15 large firms, and it has the following goals: identifying the processes through which organizational barriers impede market learning, developing specific ideas for how NPD professionals can cope more effectively with these barriers, and offering suggestions for improving market tools and techniques to help overcome these barriers.The study identifies three organizational learning barriers: avoiding ambiguity, compartmentalized thinking, and inertia. For the participants in this study, these barriers persistently act in specific ways to inhibit market learning. In acquiring market information, people typically focus on less ambiguous, more easily understood technologies and business truisms. Dissemination of market information is hindered because people focus on their own goals, which are often defined within their department’s role instead of the overall goals of the project. Inertia acts as a barrier to the effective use of market information. That is, people tend to proceed as they always have, maintaining the status quo rather than adjusting actions to capitalize on market learning.By encouraging broad functional participation in the acquisition and interpretation of data, NPD organizations can reduce the perceived ambiguity of market information. However, cross-functional approaches are only one step in overcoming organizational barriers. Managers must enable teams to develop rich, vivid market data, help people extend established routines into new practices, and promote trust. Specific market research tools and methods that promote market learning are also suggested.     

Integrating Multiple Stakeholder Issues in New Product Development: An Exploration

Addressing the interests of a wide set of stakeholders is important because it may have positive effects on financial performance. At the same time, however, it is also very complex because managers may face conflicting stakeholder issues, much more so than organizations that listen to only one stakeholder. Little is known about how multiple stakeholder issues are dealt with in the context of new product development (NPD). The objective of this study is to delineate the elements of stakeholder integration in the context of NPD. A combination of insights from stakeholder theory and market information processing serves as a theoretical perspective to guide the empirical exploration in this study. The authors take the development of green (ecological) products as an empirical context for their qualitative multiple case study. Specifically, they selected four case studies with different expected levels of stakeholder integration, based on literature about green NPD. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with key informants, collecting documents, and obtaining artifacts. In total, 28 informants from various domains were interviewed. Transcribed interviews were coded using qualitative analysis software. The results show that a distinction needs to be made between market and nonmarket stakeholders, and that not all organizations are equally capable of identifying issues that are important to both categories of stakeholders. Organizations that identify issues that are relevant to both market stakeholders and nonmarket stakeholders are more likely to face tensions between stakeholder issues in NPD. Organizations manage these tensions using several, sometimes redundant, coordination mechanisms and using multiple prioritization principles in conjunction. Based on the results, the authors conceptualize stakeholder integration capability in an NPD context as the combination of stakeholder issue identification techniques, coordination mechanisms, and prioritization principles. They propose that stakeholder integration capability is the result of a learning process. Moreover, they propose that proactivity of environmental management and environmental impact of the industry help to explain why stakeholder issue identification techniques are developed, and that the identification of more stakeholder issues leads organizations to develop coordination mechanisms and prioritization principles. Finally, the authors propose that stakeholder integration capability leads to competitive advantage through organizational identification by stakeholders. The study implies that integrating multiple stakeholder issues is not just a matter of feeding additional information into NPD processes, but of changing the nature of these NPD processes.     

Success Factors for Service Innovation: A Meta‐Analysis

Service sectors form a considerable part of the world economy. Contrary to the logical assumption that service innovation research should represent a significant share of all innovation research, the vast majority of innovation studies focus on products as opposed to services. This research presents a meta‐analysis of the antecedents of service innovation performance conducted on 92 independent samples obtained from 114 articles published between 1989 and 2015. This research contributes to our understanding of service innovation in three major ways. First, this is the first meta‐analysis that specifically assesses the relative importance of antecedents of service innovation performance, while also pinpointing the differences in meta‐analytic findings between antecedents of service and product innovation performance. Although there are some universal success factors that transcend the boundaries between services and products, the presence of marked differences implies that it would be wrong to treat the development of new services and new products as the same. Second, the meta‐analysis demonstrates that the antecedents of service innovation performance are contingent on the sector context (i.e., explicit versus tacit services). Comparing results between products and services, and between tacit and explicit services, there appears to be a continuum where explicit services sit interstitial between tacit services on one side and products on the other. Third, the meta‐analysis compares and contrasts the antecedents of two dimensions of service innovation performance (i.e., commercial success and strategic competitive advantage). Previous meta‐analyses treated these two dependent variables collectively, which falls short of identifying issues that may affect management decisions when faced with different objectives. Additionally, this research investigates the effect of several other moderators (i.e., culture, unit of analysis, journal quality, and year of publication) on the relationships between the antecedents and service innovation performance. The results are discussed in relation to their implications for research and managerial practice.     

New Product Development in Rapidly Changing Markets: An Exploratory Study

Rapid technological change can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, investors and firms of all sizes hope to reap the rewards that may arise from the apparent convergence of the computer, telecommunications, and entertainment industries. With the high level of uncertainty inherent to such rapidly changing markets, however, those potentially dazzling returns are counterbalanced by a daunting level of risk. John Mullins and Daniel Sutherland suggest that firms operating in such markets require NPD practices that can mitigate risk, manage uncertainty, and, of course, increase the likelihood of new product success. To gain insight into the NPD practices that can meet those challenges, they conducted in-depth interviews with managers who were directly involved in NPD projects at US WEST, Inc., a large, multinational firm in the telecommunications industry. The study focused on identifying practices that help the firm bring new products into rapidly changing markets quickly, efficiently, and effectively. A key objective of their study was to go beyond the basics—for example, the use of cross-functional teams—to identify specific practices that allow the firm to address the various levels of uncertainty that characterize its markets. They identify three levels of uncertainty that confront firms operating in rapidly changing markets. First, potential customers cannot easily articulate needs that a new technology may fulfill. Consequently, NPD managers are uncertain about the market opportunities that a new technology offers. Second, NPD managers are uncertain about how to turn the new technologies into products that meet customer needs. This uncertainty arises, not only from customers' inability to articulate their needs, but also from managers' difficulties in translating technological advancements into product features and benefits. Finally, senior management faces uncertainty about how much capital to invest in pursuit of rapidly changing markets as well as when to invest. The study identifies six practices that help the firm address the uncertainty and risk inherent in its rapidly changing markets. For example, market research in this firm's NPD process focuses more on probing than it does on measuring. Involvement of prospective customers in idea generation and the use of prototypes early in the NPD process help the firm uncover customer needs and market opportunities. Large-scale, quantitative market research focuses primarily on determining market size and price points.     

The Impact of User‐Oriented Design on New Product Development: An Examination of Fundamental Relationships*

Design offers a potent way to position and to differentiate products and can play a significant role in their success. In many ways it is the focus on deep understanding of the customer or user—what may be termed user‐oriented design (UOD)—that transforms a bundle of technology with the ability to provide functionality into a “product” that people desire to interact with and from which they derive benefits. Even though the importance of this type of design is gaining recognition, several fundamental relationships between user‐oriented design contributions and the new product development (NPD) process and outcomes (i.e., product) remain unresearched, although they are assumed. This article examines the fundamental relationships underlying the incorporation of a user orientation into the NPD process. The discussion is organized around UOD's impact in terms of enhancing collaborative new product development (process oriented), improving idea generation (process oriented), producing superior product or service solutions (product oriented), and facilitating product appropriateness and adoption (product oriented). Each of these is developed and presented in the form of a research proposition relating to the impact of user‐oriented design on product development. The fundamental relationships articulated concerning UOD's impact on NPD form a conceptual framework for this approach to product design and development. For practitioners, the article suggests how user‐oriented design can improve NPD through its more grounded and comprehensive approach, along with the elevated appreciation of design challenges and heightened sense of possibilities for a product being developed. For scholars, the article identifies four important areas for UOD research. In addition to the rich avenues offered for research by each of these, the framework presented provides a foundation for further study as well as the development of new measures and tools for enhancing NPD efforts.