关键词: 服务创新, 系统综述, 理论脉络, 内在联系, 动态能力, 服务主导逻辑

Abstract:     Service innovation theories, owing to their unique advantage of being suitable for cross-industry research, become the premium choice among the theories for interpreting firms′ competitiveness differences. The rise of service innovation theory reflects the change of thinking pattern throughout the entire economy, which is essentially a critique and development of previous innovation research paradigms. With the rapid development of new-generation information technologies such as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and digitalization, service innovation is constantly changing existing operation and business models of the industry, and reshaping existing markets, thus service innovation research faces major challenges. The multi-dimensional characteristics of service innovation determine it as a concept with complex content and scope, and various attributes are intertwined. Currently, the literature reviews on service innovation are limited in number and less broad in perspective; most of them are qualitative studies made through subjective judgment methods, which are less capable of handling a large amount of academic literature and the idiosyncrasies and broadness of service innovation in nature. There is a shortage of source-tracing and panorama-oriented studies, convincing findings on the theories, their evolutions, their latent inter-relationships stay inadequate, the categories of theories and their inter-links within the field remain unclear, and lead to a lack of reliable and efficient findings.
    In this paper, academic literature on service innovation research for the past 40 years (1982-2021) was collected in the authoritative database Web of Science (WoS), and innovative research methods were adopted through qualitative and quantitative methods. Employing various kinds of software such as VOSviewer, CRExplore, Metaknowledge overcome the inherent problems like the massive volume of literature, complex contents, and interwoven theories. Based on the outcomes from bibliometric analyses, content analysis, the theoretical classification, the paper clarifies the development veins and potential interconnections of theory from a panoramic view and defines the research focuses and frontiers. The results show that there are nine categories of main theories/perspectives in the scope of service innovation research: Schumpeterian, resource-based view, dynamic capability view, market orientation, absorptive capacity, knowledge-based view, relational/network view, open innovation, service-dominant logic, among which the dynamic capability view and service-dominant logic enjoys the most promising development prospect. Among the nine theories/perspectives, each has a different research subject and direction; however, they co-exist and complement each other, forming a collaborative relationship. Specifically, the classic strategic theories (resource-based view, knowledge-based view, and absorptive capacity) from the inward perspective of the enterprise itself, with more emphasis on competition, supply promotion, and value acquisition. In contrast, market orientation, open innovation, and relational/network view from the extroverted perspective, with more emphasis on partnerships, market pull, and value creation. The dynamic capability view fully considers the internal and external environment faced by the enterprise, and emphasizes the abilities to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external resources/competencies to obtain a long-term competitive advantage. As the development of the previous research, the dynamic service innovation capabilities (DSICs) framework is the theoretical sublimation of the dynamic capability view under service context, which makes the operationalization of the dynamic capability feasible under the service innovation background, and promote the unity of the future empirical researches. The service-dominant logic takes value exchange as the pointcut, emphasizes the value co-creation between production and consumption, as well as the integration of internal and external resources, it integrates multiple theories/perspectives of service innovation by introducing the concept of service ecosystem. As a meta-theory, service-dominant logic opens up an unprecedented broad horizon for service innovation research, greatly expands the connotation and application boundaries of existing theories, and makes the antecedents, paths, outcomes, and other elements of service innovation can be placed in a multi-level systematic framework. In general, the dynamic capability view and service-dominant logic are in line with the integration paradigm of service innovation research, with deeper understanding, broader perspective, and more significant logical advantage in solving research problems of service innovation.
Also, most studies now focus on service innovation and its effect on performance, ignore the internal and external environment, service types, service stage, and other contextual factors, fail to explore them within an integrated research framework. Besides the innovation in research design and methods, the paper compensates for the current weakness in the service innovation research by revealing service innovation theories/perspectives evolutions, their hidden inner-links, research frontiers, and proposing an integration framework for different service innovation theories. It thus provides future research with direction and references.
〖WTHZ〗Keywords:

Key words:  service innovation, systematic review, theoretical veins, internal links, dynamic capability, service dominant logic