Service Delivery Innovation Architecture: An Empirical Study of Antecedents and Outcomes
Vol 26, No 2; Article by Rajeev Verma and Jayasimha K R; June 2014
Service firms foster innovation so as to differentiate their business from competitors and to gain competitive advantage. Literature suggests that the existing notion of innovation in the manufacturing sector cannot be directly adopted into the service sector. Further, the drivers of service innovation require an architectural approach to find effective solutions in relation with the firm's core competency and performance outcomes. This paper investigates service delivery innovation architecture and its role in achieving sustainable competitive advantage of firms. The overarching objective of this study is to put forward an integrated service innovation framework for investigating the role of various actors of market competitiveness.
Resource advantage theory of firm competition (RA) and service-dominant logic are the two fundamental approaches to discuss service innovation at the firm level. Based on these theories, the present study develops and empirically examines an antecedent based model of service delivery innovation. The enablers of service innovation include customer and business collaboration under cocreational resources; innovation orientation and market orientation under organisational resources; and knowledge integration mechanism and information technology (IT) under integrating resources. Collecting data from 203 service sector professionals working in Mexican financial and IT firms, we tested the proposed relationship under nine hypotheses. Out of the total representative sample, financial firms represent explicit services and IT firms represent tacit services. This classification is based on the service firm classification scheme proposed by De Luca and Gima (2007). The structural model has been tested using AMOS 18.0. Results show that customer orientation strengthens service delivery-performance relationship. Overall, this work contributes in understanding resource allocation of service firms to ensure sustainable growth.