{"id":10461,"date":"2020-12-13T22:02:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T03:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/?p=10461"},"modified":"2021-04-27T08:25:38","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T12:25:38","slug":"service-innovation-research-the-gain-is-worth-the-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/2020\/12\/service-innovation-research-the-gain-is-worth-the-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Service Innovation Research: The Gain is Worth the Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Guest article by Thomas Dotzel and Venkatesh Shankar, winners of the SERVSIG Best Service Article Award<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We would like to start by thanking the members of the awards committee and SERVSIG for selecting our article for the 2019 Best Service Article Award. We are deeply honored. Spending many hours on selection and organizing an elaborate virtual awards ceremony \u2013 all during a global pandemic – is the epitome of excellent service. Thank you for that! The COVID pandemic has caused significant hardship and frustration in all our lives. But it has also allowed us to have the wonderful experience of watching award ceremonies on the SERVSIG YouTube channel<\/a>, while sitting around the breakfast table and sharing the news instantly with our families. We thank Werner Kunz for inviting us to write about our article and our current exciting new research project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most scholars would agree that the vast majority of innovation research focuses on goods innovation in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context. To us, this focus seemed somewhat odd, considering that business-to-business (B2B) markets occupy the lion’s share of all markets and that developed countries are all service-driven economies. After studying predominantly B2C service innovations in our previous projects, we decided to tackle this issue head on to determine just how impactful B2B service innovations are for firm value and risk and how these effects differ from those of B2C service innovations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

B2B service\ninnovation is an important yet under-researched area, which made it easier for\nus to identify powerful research questions. But answering these questions and rigorously\ndeveloping and testing key hypotheses proved to be a significant challenge.\nThere are no readily available databases that provide longitudinal data on\nservice innovations across different industries. But we were undeterred. We\nrolled up our sleeves, and thanks to the help of more than a dozen research\nassistants, began the process of painstakingly collecting the required\ninnovation data by digging through approximately 200,000 press releases and news\nsources. We used both manual coding and natural language processing techniques\nto analyze the innovation announcements. We completed our dataset by merging the\ninnovation data with other firm and industry-level data that we downloaded from\ndatabases such as Computstat, CRSP, and SDC Platinum. In the end, compiling our\ndataset took thousands of human-hours. Having gone through this tedious\nprocess, we now completely understand why empirical research on service\ninnovation is significantly underrepresented in the innovation literature,\ndespite its managerial and theoretical relevance. It is slow and enormously\ntime-consuming, but we would like to emphasize that we consider the outcome to\nbe easily worth the effort. We hope our work inspires the service research community\nto not shy away from challenging data collection if it helps answer important\nresearch questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our main\nfindings underscore the attractiveness of B2B service innovations. They have a\npositive effect on firm value and do not exacerbate either systematic risk or\nidiosyncratic risk. This positive impact is even enhanced for firms that also\nintroduce more goods innovations. Importantly, B2B service innovations have a\ngreater positive effect on firm value than B2C service innovations. However, surprisingly,\nunlike B2C service innovations, the effect of B2B service innovations on firm value\nis marginally less favorable when the innovation announcement emphasizes\ncustomers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving\nforward, we will continue to study service innovations one data point at a time,\njust as we have done in the past. We are excited to have completed another\narchival data collection on a new project that explores innovations in the\ntechnology sector. Technology firms are among the most valued firms and are worth\ntrillions of dollars. They are a hotbed for service, goods, and software\ninnovations. Given the current antitrust discussions in the United States involving\ntechnology firms, we are all the more eager to develop a better understanding\nof how the different types of innovations contribute to these firms’ extraordinary\nvaluation.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In closing, research in service innovation has been growing steadily over the last decade. However, according to many leading executives, it is not growing fast enough. Many important questions still remain unanswered, offering tremendous scope for future research. We hope this article will spur more scholars to dive further into this area, vindicating our view that the contribution gain is worth the data-collection pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thomas Dotzel
College of Business
University of Nebraska-Lincoln<\/p>\n\n\n\n






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Venkatesh Shankar
Mays Business School
Texas A&M University






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Source of the SERVSIG Best Paper Award:
Dotzel, T. & Shankar, V. (2019).\u00a0The Relative Effects of Business-to-Business (vs. Business-to-Consumer) Service Innovations on Firm Value and Firm Risk: An Empirical Analysis<\/strong>.\u00a0Journal of Marketing<\/em>, 83(5), 133\u2013152. doi:\u00a010.1177\/0022242919847221<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest article by Thomas Dotzel and Venkatesh Shankar, winners of the SERVSIG Best Service Article Award. We would like to start by thanking the members of the awards committee and SERVSIG for selecting our article for the 2019 Best Service Article Award. We are deeply honored. Spending many hours on selection and organizing an elaborate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[118,694,848],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10461"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10882,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10461\/revisions\/10882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}