Abstract
Growth management depends on an accurate understanding of an organizations’ current situation within the market in which it operates. Literature indicates that there is still inefficiency in quantitatively diagnosing the driving factors of service innovation and growth management. The purpose of this research is to identify the levels and priorities of sustainable growth management strategies with detailed measurements for industrial service innovation. The research focuses on the construction industry as the case context to scrutinize and compare various indexes and policy platforms for the evaluation of service innovation and the development of a diagnostic framework. The paper further identified the developmental obstacles of service innovation from 585 survey responses from construction enterprise representatives from Shanghai, Beijing and Xi’an in China, using average score method and entropy weight method. The data analysis identified the service innovation level and development priorities for the enterprises can assist in determining sustainable service innovation paths. The research then combined the competitive advantage characteristics method using a cluster analysis to develop a growth management framework of service innovation in the construction industry. The research results indicated that the majority of analyzed enterprises were in the second phase of their development, with clear policy opportunities for increasing levels of service innovation. However, the results also indicate the majority of sample enterprises were not encouraging the efforts of employees to strive for innovation and were lacking appropriate investment funding towards service-related innovation. These two weaker aspects offer a starting point for firm-level managers to consider when aiming to improving service innovation. The paper contributes by advancing the quantitative evaluation of growth management policies for service innovation. Furthermore, it provides possible measures for improving service innovation with particular emphasis on service innovation in project-based construction enterprises. Finally, it offers a practical diagnostic tool to improve industry level growth via increased service innovation.
Highlights
Service innovation is an important business strategy for many enterprises
Using Equation (2), the average score of the questionnaire was 113.67, which was in the Second Level of Table 9 and the driving force was medium
This paper has proposed an integrated framework and used a new mixed method of (a) average score, (b) entropy weight method, (c) the competitive-advantage analysis conforming to natural rule, and (d) the cluster-identification method, to assess the growth management levels and priorities for industrial service innovation
Summary
Service innovation is an important business strategy for many enterprises. There are significant challenges that impact on the growth of a construction organization These include a disjointed and fragmented production system, which is based on temporary projects, resulting in knowledge development and transfer discontinuities impacting on a construction organizations ability to tap into innovation knowledge [6]. Enterprises and industries have introduced a variety of driving policies for service innovation. In consideration of labor productivity and contributions of science and technology, many driving organization policies do not reflect this emphasis on service innovation [11,12,13,14]. There are significant amount of qualitative techniques driving service innovation policy [15]. Quantitative approaches are able to support the needs of industry growth management and help organizations to stimulate their service innovation effectively [18]. From a practitioner or managerial perspective, there is an urgent need to investigate how to identify the countermeasures to further improve the competitive advantages of enterprises
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