Service innovation especially has become a critical issue as in most developed countries services account for about 70% of employment. The effective management of customer value can promote loyalty of customers and hence competitive advantages. Therefore, service providers should further focus on customer-oriented service innovations. However, past studies pay little attention to exploring implications and development of innovations in services based on a perspective of customer value. The objectives of this project are: 1) to explore the recent overview of innovation in services, further to induce conceptual dimensions and core value of business administration in service sectors, and finally to statistically test the key successful factors of service innovations; 2) to explore evolution models of service innovations to predict innovation trend; 3) to carry out the cross-sector comparisons to understand the difference of service innovations. This project adopts a case-oriented qualitative research in service industries. Six sectors are selected according to a theoretical sampling. The methods of data collection include collection of secondary data and in-depth interviews. The collected data is analyzed using pattern-matching, explanation-building, time-series and program logic model. The objectives of this 3-year project are briefly described in each year. 1. In the first year, the selected service sectors are narrowed to seven sub-sectors. Then some representative institutes in these sectors are selected as research cases. In this year, we will construct the database of service innovations in these addressed cases through collecting secondary data and in-depth interviews. 2. In the second year, we will analyze each innovation event in the database to understand the recent overview of innovation in services. Furthermore, we will induce conceptual dimensions and evolution models of service innovations. Finally, we will invite practitioners and scholars to discuss the derived findings. 3. In the third year, we will compare the outcomes in the selected sub-sectors to understand the difference of innovations in the distinct sectors. Finally, we will test the service innovation model induced by the qualitative research in the second year.
