Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Service Innovation Capabilities for Idea Assessment: An Appraisal of Established and Novel Approaches

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Handbook of Service Innovation

Abstract

The importance of innovation for companies to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged. While earlier studies have emphasised the critical importance of idea assessment as part of the new product and new services development process, the topic has been under-represented in academic research recently. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview on the depiction of idea assessment in services research. For this, we start by exploring the representation of the topic in question in recent service innovation capability frameworks. On a more operational level we reflect service-related publications on criteria, information sources, group compositions and approaches for idea assessment. Finally, by reporting on a case study with a German financial services provider, we introduce serious games and enterprise crowdfunding as two novel approaches for assessing service ideas. Overall, we find that internal, service providing staff should play a major role in the assessment of service ideas. Surprisingly, classical portfolio management approaches making use of deliberation in small management boards seem to be the predominant method discussed in the literature and applied in practice. Mechanisms which are designed to involve larger crowds into idea assessment exist, however, are not yet widespread. The two novel approaches show promising avenues for involving service providing staff into idea assessment in a motivating way.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Aas TH (2009) Service innovation management: designing an ex-ante value assessment tool. In Proceedings of the 2nd ISPIM Innovation Symposium

    Google Scholar 

  • Aas TH (2010) Implementing a value assessment tool for service innovation ideas. Int J Innov Manage 14(06):1149

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aas TH (2011) Management control of service innovation activities: an exploratory investigation of best practice. Int J Serv Technol Manage 16(3/4):318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aas TH, Pedersen PE (2010) The firm-level effects of service innovation: a literature review. Int J Innov Manage 14(5):759–794

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Agarwal R, Selen W (2009) Dynamic capability building in service value networks for achieving service innovation. Decis Sci 40(3):431–475

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arrow K, Forsythe R, Gorham M (2008) The promise of prediction markets. Science 320(5878):877–878

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barczak G, Griffin A, Kahn KB (2009) PERSPECTIVE: Trends and drivers of success in NPD practices: results of the 2003 PDMA best practices study. J Prod Innov Manage 26(1):3–23

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Belleflamme P, Lambert T, Schwienbacher A (2014) Crowdfunding: tapping the right crowd. J Bus Ventur 29(5):585–609

    Google Scholar 

  • Blazevic V, Lievens A (2004) Learning during the new financial service innovation process: antecedents and performance effects. J Bus Res 57(4):374–391

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brentani U (2001) Innovative versus incremental new business services: different keys for achieving success. J Prod Innov Manage 18(3):169–187

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bullinger H-J, Fähnrich K-P, Meiren T (2003) Service engineering—methodical development of new service products. Int J Prod Econ 85(3):275–287

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chesbrough H (2010) Open services innovation: rethinking your business to grow and compete in a new era. Wiley, San Francisco

    Google Scholar 

  • Chesbrough H (2011) Open service innovation. MIT Sloan Manage Rev 52(2):85–90

    Google Scholar 

  • Christensen CM, Kaufman SP, Shih WC (2008) Innovation killers: how financial tools destroy your capacity to do new things. Harvard Bus Rev 86(1):98–105

    Google Scholar 

  • CMMI Product Team (2010) CMMI for services, version 1.3. Technical report, CarnegieMellon University, Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper RG (1999) New product portfolio management: practices and performance. J Prod Innov Manage 16(4):333–351

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cooper RG (2009) How companies are reinventing their idea–to–launch methodologies. Res Technol Manage 52(2):47–57

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper RG, Edgett SJ, Kleinschmidt EJ (2001a) Portfolio management for new products. Working paper, no. 11. http://materias.fi.uba.ar/7558/Lecturas/Portfolio%20Management%20for%20New%20Products-Picking%20the%20Winners.pdf. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Cooper RG, Edgett SJ, Kleinschmidt EJ (2001b) Portfolio management for new product development: results of an industry practices study. R&D Manage 31(4):361–380

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dalkey N, Helmer O (1963) An experimental application of the delphi method to the use of experts. Manage Sci 9(3):458–467

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dean DL, Hender JM, Rodgers TL (2006) Identifying quality, novel, and creative ideas: Constructs and scales for idea evaluation. J Assoc Inf Syst 7(10):646–699

    Google Scholar 

  • den Hertog P, van der Aa W, de Jong MW (2010) Capabilities for managing service innovation: towards a conceptual framework. J Serv Manage 21(4):490–514

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Essmann HE (2009) Toward innovation capability maturity. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stellenbosch

    Google Scholar 

  • Essmann HE, du Preez N (2009) An innovation capability maturity model—development and initial application. Eng Technol 53:435–446

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldmann N, Gimpel H, Kohler M, Weinhardt C (2013) Using crowd funding for idea assessment inside organizations lessons learned from a market engineering perspective. In Proceedings of the third international conference on social computing and its applications (SCA), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Google Scholar 

  • Froehle CM, Roth AV, Chase RB, Voss CA (2000) Antecedents of new service development effectiveness: an exploratory examination of strategic operations choices. J Serv Res 3(1):3–17

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Füller J, Bartl M, Ernst H, Mühlbacher H (2004) Community based innovation: a method to utilize the innovative potential of online communities. In Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii international conference on system sciences 2004, p 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  • Gadrey J, Gallouj F, Weinstein O (1995) New modes of innovation: how services benefit industry. Int J Serv Ind Manage 6(3):4–16

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ganz W, Satzger G, Schultz C (eds) (2012) Methods in service innovation: current trends and future perspectives. Fraunhofer, Stuttgart, pp 1–99

    Google Scholar 

  • Geiger D, Seedorf S, Schulze T, Nickerson R, Schader M (2011) Managing the crowd: towards a taxonomy of crowdsourcing processes. Proceedings of the seventeenth Americas conference on information systems. Detroit, Michigan, pp 1–11

    Google Scholar 

  • Gillen BJ, Plott CR, Shum M (2012) Information aggregation mechanisms in the field: sales forecasting inside Intel. Working paper. http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~bgillen/papers/IntelForecast.pdf. Accessed 14 March 2014

  • Graefe A, Armstrong JS (2011) Comparing face-to-face meetings, nominal groups, Delphi and prediction markets on an estimation task. Int J Forecast 27(1):183–195

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greeley B (2012) Making sense of the games politicians play. Bloomberg Businessweek. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-30/making-sense-of-the-games-politicians-play. Accessed 1 December 2013

  • Grönroos C (2006) Adopting a service logic for marketing. Mark Theor 6(3):317–333

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hamel G (2006) The why, what, and how of management innovation. Harvard Bus Rev 84(2):72–84

    Google Scholar 

  • Hansen MT, Birkinshaw J (2007) The innovation value chain. Harvard Bus Rev 85(6):121–130

    Google Scholar 

  • Hohmann L (2006) Innovation games: creating breakthrough products through collaborative play. Addison-Wesley Longman, Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  • Howe J (2009) Crowdsourcing: why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. Random House, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Hrastinski S, Kviselius NZ, Ozan H, Edenius M (2010) A review of technologies for open innovation: characteristics and future trends. In Proceedings of the 43rd annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, p 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  • IBM (2006) Expanding the innovation horizon: the global CEO study 2006. Technical report, IBM Global Business Services

    Google Scholar 

  • Janssen M, Alexiev A, den Hertog P, Castaldi C (2012) A multi-level multidimensional approach for measuring dynamic capabilities in service innovation management. Paper presented at the Druid conference, Copenhagen, p 1–24

    Google Scholar 

  • Kamp G, Koen PA (2009) Improving the idea screening process within organizations using prediction markets: a theoretical perspective. J Prediction Markets 3(2):39–64

    Google Scholar 

  • Kindström D, Kowalkowski C, Sandberg E (2013) Enabling service innovation: a dynamic capabilities approach. J Bus Res 66(8):1063–1073

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kohler M, Feldmann N, Habryn F, Satzger G (2013) Service innovation analytics: towards assessment and monitoring of innovation capabilities in service firms. In Proceedings of the 46th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, Computer Society, p 1347–1356

    Google Scholar 

  • Maglio PP, Spohrer J (2008) Fundamentals of service science. J Acad Mark Sci 36(1):18–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Makadok R (2001) Toward a synthesis of the resource-based and dynamic-capability views of rent creation. Strateg Manage J 22(5):387–401

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Massolution (2012) Crowdfunding industry report: market trends, composition and crowdfunding platforms. http://www.crowdsourcing.org. Accessed 14 March 2013

  • Medeiros J (2014) How pebble kickstarted a trend. Wired Magazine UK. http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/01/features/how-pebble-kickstarted-a-trend. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Muller M, Geyer W, Soule T, Daniels S, Cheng L (2013) Crowdfunding inside the enterprise: employee-initiatives for innovation and collaboration. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems 2013, Paris, p 503–512

    Google Scholar 

  • Muller M, Geyer W, Soule T, Wafer J (2014) Geographical and organizational commonalities in enterprise crowdfunding. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing (CSCW), Baltimore, Maryland

    Google Scholar 

  • Neely A (2007) The Servitization of manufacturing: an analysis of global trends. In Proceedings of the 14th European operations management association conference 2007, Ankara, p 1–10

    Google Scholar 

  • Ordanini A, Miceli L, Pizzetti M, Parasuraman A (2011) Crowdfunding: transforming customers into investors through innovative service platforms. J Serv Manage 22(4):443–470

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Reilly CA, Tushman ML (2004) The ambidextrous organization. Harvard Bus Rev 82(4):74–81

    Google Scholar 

  • Plott CR, Wit J, Yang WC (2013) Parimutuel betting markets as information aggregation devices: experimental results. Econ Theor 22(2):311–351

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Schulze T, Indulska M, Geiger D, Korthaus A (2012) Idea assessment in open innovation: a state of practice. In Proceedings of the 20th European conference on information systems (ECIS), Barcelona, paper 149

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith AM, Fischbacher M, Wilson FA (2007) New service development: from panoramas to precision. Eur Manage J 25(5):370–383

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Soukhoroukova A, Spann M, Skiera B (2012) Sourcing, filtering, and evaluating new product ideas: an empirical exploration of the performance of idea markets. J Prod Innov Manage 29(1):100–112

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spears B, Lacomb C, Barnett J (2009) Examining trader behaviour in idea markets: an implementation of GE’s imagination markets. J Prediction Markets 3(1):17–39

    Google Scholar 

  • Starbucks Coffee Company (2011a) Mobile payment debuts nationally at Starbucks. http://news.starbucks.com/news/mobile-payment-debuts-nationally-at-starbucks. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Starbucks Coffee Company (2011b) Starbucks mobile transactions exceed 26 million within first year. http://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-mobile-transactions-exceed-26-million-within-first-year. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Starbucks Coffee Company (2012) Starbucks accelerates mobile payments leadership by choosing square for payments. http://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-accelerates-mobile-payments-leadership-by-choosing-square-for-pay. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Stathel S (2010) Innovation assessment via information markets. Doctoral dissertation, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

    Google Scholar 

  • Sundbo J (1992) The tied entrepreneur: on the theory and practice of institutionalisation of creativity and innovation in service firms. Creativity Innov Manage 1(3):109–120

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sundbo J (1997) Management of innovation in services. Serv Ind J 17(3):432–455

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Surowiecki J (2004) The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations. Anchor Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Susi T, Johannesson M, Backlund P (2007) Serious games: an overview. Report, Skövde, Sweden. http://his.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:2416. Accessed 8 March 2013

  • Teece DJ (2007) Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. Strateg Manage J 28(13):1319–1350

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tidd J, Hull FM (2006) Managing service innovation: the need for selectivity rather than ‘best practice’. New Technol Work Employ 21(2):139–161

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tode C (2012) Starbucks reaches 42M mobile payment transactions as app gains momentum. Mobile Commerce daily. http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/starbucks-reaches-42m-mobile-payment-transactions-as-app-gains-momentum. Accessed 13 March 2014

  • Vandermerwe S, Rada J (1989) Servitization of business: adding value by adding services. Eur Manage J 6(4):314–324

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van de Ven A, Delbecq A (1974) The effectiveness of nominal, delphi, and interacting group decision making processes. Acad Manage J 17(4):605–621

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Riel AC, Lemmink J, Ouwersloot H (2004) High-technology service innovation success: a decision-making perspective. J Prod Innov Manage 21:348–359

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Riel AC, Semeijn J, Hammedi W, Henseler J (2011) Technology-based service proposal screening and decision-making effectiveness. Manage Decis 49(5):762–783

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vermeulen P, Dankbaar B (2002) The organisation of product innovation in the financial sector. Serv Ind J 22(3):77–98

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vermeulen P, van der Aa W (2003) Organizing innovation in services. In: Tidd J, Hull FM (eds) Service innovation: organizational responses to technological opportunities and market imperatives (No. 9). Imperial College, London, p 35–53

    Google Scholar 

  • West J, Bogers M (2014) Leveraging external sources of innovation: a review of research on open innovation. J Prod Innov Manage 31(4):814–831

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolfers J, Zitzewitz E (2006) Prediction markets in theory and practice. IZA discussion papers, no. 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/33384. Accessed 13 March 2014

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Service Research Institute, Englerstr. 11, D-76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Niels Feldmann & Marc Kohler

Authors
  1. Niels Feldmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Marc Kohler
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Niels Feldmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, Australia

    Renu Agarwal

  2. University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

    Willem Selen

  3. UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

    Göran Roos

  4. UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Roy Green

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer-Verlag London

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Feldmann, N., Kohler, M. (2015). Service Innovation Capabilities for Idea Assessment: An Appraisal of Established and Novel Approaches. In: Agarwal, R., Selen, W., Roos, G., Green, R. (eds) The Handbook of Service Innovation. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_8

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-6589-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-6590-3

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation