Developing and validating a measure of service innovation capability and maturity

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the service sector must continuously innovate and adapt to remain competitive and ensure their survival. Key to this is their service innovation capability, a dynamic capability underpinning the repeated generation of new services and improvement of existing ones. However, despite the significance of this capability within the literature, there are serious gaps in how it is understood, and no measure exists of its effectiveness or maturity. As a result, practitioners are unaware of their service innovation capability performance or where resources should be directed for its improvement.

This discussion will detail the best practice procedure through which a formative measure of service innovation capability was constructed and validated using responses from 284 SMEs in the Republic of Ireland. The novel and original measure developed in this research is the first of its kind and makes several major contributions to theory and practice. Specifically, it provides empirical support for the three subdimensions as predictors of service innovation capability performance, its synthesis and execution of a best practice index construction procedure offer a value template to researchers with similar objectives, and the managers of SMEs are provided with a tool to quantitatively understand their capability maturity and learn where their effort or attention ought to be directed to achieve improvements.

Speaker's bio

Tadhg Blommerde earned his PhD in innovation management at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) in Ireland where he developed and validated a service innovation capability maturity model for SMEs. Presently, he holds dual roles and is an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, researching on the topic of innovation in professional service firms. His work has previously been published in the Journal of Business Research.