Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of findings and conceptual arguments with respect to services, and innovation in services, especially from an SI perspective. It draws especially on the work undertaken on innovation at airports, in healthcare and in retailing, but it will also be informed by wider considerations of services and their innovation activities. By “services,” we mean all sectors conventionally identified as services, although telecommunications and computer software – which are especially technological – are examined more fully and separately in other chapters of this book.

This study begins, in section 2, by outlining the economic significance of services and discussing what is meant by services. Section 3 concerns the SI perspective with regard to services, and summarizes the work undertaken on services within the ESSY project. Section 4 then draws on these studies to provide summary answers to the main questions raised by the SI perspective in relation to services. Finally, section 5 provides a new perspective on SIs that has evolved out of our work within ESSY.

The main points of the chapter are the following:

• Services are not (normally) engaged in the production of tangible products but cover a huge range of diverse activities, associated with various types of transformation (i.e. physical, spatial and temporal transformations, affecting people, things and information). The great diversity of service activities is not reflected in a comparable depth in the understanding of innovation in services, which has been neglected in favor of studies on manufacturing. […]