Determinants to Service Innovation Success: an Organizational Orientation Perspective

What makes business based on service innovations to become more successful? In defining relevant determinants for the success, we focus on service providers that offer business-to-business services. This perspective highlights the significance of organizational orientation, which is an emerging approach in the service literature. We identify its three key dimensions that affect service businesses' innovation success. These three dimensions; customer, entrepreneurial and value creation orientations, are both parallel and overlapping, and they interact throughout the service creation and consumption life-cycle. We propose that the most successful innovators in the contemporary service economy need to simultaneously become customer-driven and engage entrepreneurially in needs co-creation, and commit themselves to value co-creation activities. The implementation of these orientations can, however, be challenging because a new kind of attitudinal perspective is required. This paper contributes to service literature by describing key factors that drive success of the providers' business based on service innovation. Our work helps firms in perceiving and developing their service strategy, sales and customer relationships.