روش های نوآوری تولید کنندگان B2B و ارائه دهندگان خدمات: آیا آنها واقعا متفاوت هستند؟ Innovation practices of B2B manufacturers and service providers: Are they really different?

1. Introduction Innovation is increasingly recognized as the driving force behind firm performance and sustaining a competitive advantage. Chemical companies launch some 1000+ new products every year and even smaller business-to-business (B2B) companies with a more limited product range are betting heavily on innovation. Product innovation has been studied for several decades by academic researchers, resulting in a large, well-documented and coherent body of knowledge about the product innovation process and its key success factors (Hauser, Tellis, & Griffin, 2006; Henard & Szymanski, 2001; Markham & Lee, 2013). The innovation literature’s strong bias towards products is in sharp contrast with the dominant role of services in most advanced economies, where services often generate > 70% of the gross domestic product and employ 70% of their workforce (CIA World Factbook, 2015; Ostrom et al., 2010). In addition, new services are considered one of the key drivers of a firm’s continual growth and competitive strategic advantage (Randhawa & Scerri, 2015; Thakur & Hale, 2013). On the one hand, this dominant and increasing role of services and service innovation in advanced economies has resulted in a growing attention from innovation scholars (Biemans, Griffin, & Moenaert, 2016; Jiménez-Zarco, Martínez-Ruiz, & González-Benito, 2006; Papastathopoulou & Hultink, 2012), who have studied a broad range of topics such as success factors (De Brentani, 1989; Storey, Cankurtaran, Papastathopoulou, & Hultink, 2016), service innovation processes (Easingwood, 1986; Kindström & Kowalkowski, 2009), customer and supplier involvement (Alam & Perry, 2002; Carbonell, RodríguezEscudero, & Pujari, 2009; Heirati & Siahtiri, in press), organizational factors and capabilities (De Jong & Vermeulen, 2003; Kindström, Kowalkowski, & Sandberg, 2013), service ecosystems (Vargo, Wieland, & Akaka, 2015) and service innovation in the context of limited resources (Witell et al., 2017). On the other hand, despite this increasing understanding, the service innovation literature still remains rather fragmented and fails to coalesce into an overall coherent body of knowledge (Biemans et al., 2016). Indeed, numerous researchers emphasize that the service innovation domain remains underdeveloped and that much additional research is needed (Droege, Hildebrand, & Forcada, 2009; Salunke, Weerawardena, & McColl-Kennedy, 2011; Storey & Hull, 2010). For instance, Kuester et al. (2013: 533) conclude that “Although researchers have shown growing interest in [service innovation] issues, this area is still underutilized.” The dearth of conclusive service innovation research also appears to be reflected in service innovation performance, as there is no evidence that service firms are getting better at innovation (Storey & Hughes, 2013). Lacking guidance from service innovation research, firms tend to fall back on established models and concepts from the product innovation literature, such as the familiar Stage-Gate™ process (Cooper, 2008). But there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which service innovation differs from product innovation, and therefore, about the extent to which concepts from the product innovation literature apply to service innovation (Biemans et al., 2016; Storey et al., 2016). While some scholars argue that the essentials of product and service innovation are similar and thus concepts developed for product innovation are easily applied to service innovation, others reason that the unique characteristics of services require innovation concepts, processes and models specifically designed for a service context (Droege et al., 2009; Nijssen, Hillebrand, Vermeulen, & Kemp, 2006).