Many years after services outdistanced manufacturing from an employment viewpoint, manufacturing continues to lead economic analyses, including innovation studies. As a response to this a new strand of service innovation research has surfaced within the past decade. These reports don’t make an effort to compare innovation in services directly with innovation in manufacturing, instead they strive to study distinctive features of service innovation. It has among other things led to the introduction of new, service-specific innovation concepts. However, as this report seeks to indicate, these concepts imply a merging of actual innovation with activities like learning and codification of knowledge
Almost all innovation studies concentrate on technological innovation in manufacturing, highlighting that innovation concept has its roots in a time where manufacturing was still the key economic activity. Thus many years after services outdistanced manufacturing from an employment perspective, manufacturing has continued to dominate innovation studies. Research projects of service innovation continue to be in a relatively early development phase, where approaches applying a traditional manufacturing logic to service innovation are present alongside approaches that view services as distinctive activities…
Source: Copenhagen Business School