ABSTRACT
As the case for services innovation has become prominent, efforts have grown to extend existing large-scale surveys of industrial innovation, which have typically been largely restricted to manufacturing industry, to cover services. Many earlier commentators saw services as supplier-driven sectors, absorbing, often belatedly, technologies developed in manufacturing sectors. The importance of client-intensity to the innovation process has been stressed by one line of analysis. Intangibility may render the service innovation process distinctive by making it hard to safeguard innovations by the standard intellectual property protection mechanism of patents. The economic system is seen as a web of intertwined functions, some of which for largely historical reasons are labelled services, some of which are labelled manufacturing. There are many anomalies generated by this historical process. Analysis of the services sectors, and of the innovation processes which they contribute to, is a powerful way of examining the changes.
