Product and Service Innovation

Abstract

As the pace of change continues to accelerate for firms across all industries, geographic locations, and markets, many companies are beginning to challenge the traditional view of what constitutes product and service innovation. In a sense, we are seeing the innovation of innovation. At a very basic level, product and service innovation is the enhancement, reconfiguration, or replacement of anything that generates revenue for a company. A product and service innovation strategy provides the guidelines for individuals throughout a company to understand the way forward for their company and shape their activities to contribute toward a defined goal. In response to the current environment of accelerated change, we have witnessed somewhat of a paradigm shift away from linear innovation strategy models to non-linear, more complex and creative models. In a traditional, linear model of product and service innovation, companies remain competitive by making incremental improvements and adding new features to comparable products serving similar markets. In this general category of product and service innovation strategy, the primary question driving the strategy is “how do our products and services perform relative to other companies doing the same thing?”