Organizing for Service Innovation: Best-Practice or Configurations?

Joe Tidd and Frank Hull
Additional contact information
Frank Hull: Graduate Business School, Fordham University

No 77, SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: In this paper we contrast the notions of best-practice and configurations contingent on environmental conditions. The analysis draws upon our study of 38 UK and 70 US service firms which includes an assessment of the organization, processes, tools and systems used, and how these factors influence variation in the development and delivery of new services. The best-practice framework is found to be predictive of performance improvement in samples in both the UK and USA, but the model better fits the USA than UK data. We analyze the UK data to identify alternative configurations. Four system configurations are identified: project-based; mass customization; cellular; and organic-technical. Each has a different combination of organization, processes, tools and systems which offer different performance advantages. The results provide an opportunity for updating the typologies of operations and adapting them to include services, and begin to challenge the notion of any universal 'best practice' management or organization of new product or service development.

Keywords: service industry; performance improvement; best-practice; alternative system configurations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 L8 O2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2002-01-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/spru/publications/imprint/sewps/sewp77/sewp77.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sru:ssewps:77

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by University of Sussex Business School Communications Team ().