ABSTRACT
“Capturing the ways in which companies are innovating services” is presented by Ostrom et al. (2010, p. 12) as one of the priorities for academic research on services. This echoes Menor and Roth (2007)'s argument according to which “current theory and understanding of the strategies and tactics for developing new services is inadequate” (p. 825). Although many papers have addressed the determinants of innovative activity (see for instance DeJong and Vermeulen (2003) for a review of the service sector) only a scarce number of them examine the flip side of the coin incarnating the causes pertaining to a lack of innovative dynamism within firms. Very little is known about barriers to innovation, their perception, their intensity and their consequences on the innovative activities of the service sector. Yet, the state of the art of research on innovation in the service sector reveals the existence of obstacles and roadblocks to the marketing and the delivery of new services and activities. To understand what really hampers innovation in the service sector, we examine the difficulties firms reported in their attempts to design new customer value propositions. As the literature agrees on the peculiar nature of innovation undertaken in different service sectors (Kvalshaugen et al., 2008) we are inclined to think that innovative obstacles vary across the sub-fields of the service industry. We deliberately put manufacturing activities aside and concentrate on the service sector as it accounts for two thirds of the added value produced by the developing world and is considered the backbone of its economy. Concentrating the analysis on barriers encountered by service industries will provide some insights into the perceived lack of innovative capacity compared to the manufacturing sector (Wölf, 2005; Miles, 2008; Cordellier, 2009).
