Resumo

There is an increasing relevance of a service logic in the economy which is impacting the share of GDP value added and the labor markets globally. But despite services great importance, there is a lack of studies that properly capture how service firms innovate. More than that, R&D investment does not seem to capture with accuracy the innovative activity of service organizations. A means to better represent the innovative behavior of such firms is to use a combination of innovation capabilities (Guan & Ma, 2003; Teece, 1986; Yam et al., 2011; Zawislak et al., 2012).

There is still a lack of studies on how services develop innovation capabilities. Moreover, there are conceptual issues on measuring innovation activities in services, and current literature does not seem to have closed this gap yet. For that reason, there is a need for new research initiatives that develop new concepts and meaningful scales for measuring service innovation and its impact on customers and markets. In this sense, the research question for this study is: “how does the service innovation literature address the topic of capabilities?”

There is a materiality bias in innovation research that often ignores the immaterial aspects of service innovation - leading to inaccurate measurements of the service industry’s economic impact and performance (Gallouj & Savona, 2009). The microfoundations that constitute innovation capabilities reside in a wide and diverse range of sources, for instance organizational structures, systems, processes, personnel and procedures. All that set of managerial issues are involved in making a firm more or less capable of generating ideas for service innovation and leveraging them into the market.

The authors conducted a bibliometric study. They collected documents from Scopus and Web of Science databases and examined a sample of 1523 studies published between the years 1974 and 2020. The data was analyzed with Bibliometrix R-package, with additional co-citation analysis carried out using VosViewer software.

Results indicate that there is a growing discussion about service innovation and innovation capabilities. However, the theoretical body is still very fragmented and, therefore, there is a need for a future systematic review of such literature. In addition, due to the great variety of theoretical approaches that have already been used, the authors suggest which one is the most suitable for analyzing service innovation. Finally, it is clear that few studies in the sample involve data collected from different geographic regions, other than developed countries.

Through this research, the main studies and journals in the area were identified, and a research agenda targeted to scholars was suggested. A point that should be highlighted is the interesting intersection between the themes of innovation, service innovation and innovation capabilities as basic themes and engines of the field. Among the different theories used, it seems that innovation capabilities are those that have a greater affinity to the theme of services.

Evangelista, R., (2000), Sectoral patterns of technological change in services. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 9(3), 183-222. Gallouj, F., and Savona, P., (2009), Innovation in services: A review of the debate and a research agenda. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 19(2), 149-172 . Yam, R., Lo, W., Tang, E., and Lau, A., (2011), Analysis of sources of innovation, technological innovation capabilities, and performance: An empirical study of Hong Kong manufacturing industries. Research Policy, 40(3), 391-402.