La participación del cliente y su efecto sobre la innovación en servicios

Resumo

Services play a vital role in most developed economies and its importance is not confined only to the services sector, but also it extends to other sectors such as industry, in which companies offer various services along with tangible products. Consequently, service innovation becomes a requirement and allows building a new and/or improved offer enabling the company to be a pioneer in its sector. Based on the above considerations, this paper aims to study how customer participation affects service innovation. To this, we delve into the possible roles which could play the customer: customer participation as an information resource (CPI) and customer participation as a co-developer (CPC) and how each of them affects the agile service innovation. We also studied the effect of agile service innovation on process and service innovation. In the same way, mutual trust as a possible factor antecedent of customer participation is analyzed. In this sense, a theoretical model linking the results and antecedents factors of the CPI and CPC on innovation was proposed. This model was tested on a sample of 200 Spanish service firms using a structural equation model. The findings confirm that agile service innovation is facilitated by CPI and CPC and mutual trust enhances this partnership. Also, we demonstrated that agile service innovation positively affects process and service innovation. Few studies have addressed this issue in the context of services; therefore, this paper attempts to fill this gap. It should be stressed that product innovation is inherently different from service innovation, due to the intangible nature of these, hence the interest of this study focused only on service companies.