The Role of User Involvement in the Framing Stage of Service Innovation Projects

Abstract

As a consequence of the growing importance of services in contemporary economies, and the shift to a service-dominant logic in marketing, new service development (NSD) is unarguably important for a large majority of firms. However, developing new services remains a difficult task and the majority of NSD projects eventually fail. Therefore an urgent need exists to further improve the NSD process. In this article, we focus on improving the NSD process by better understanding the role of user involvement in the innovation framing stage. In this article, our aim is to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework investigating user involvement in the framing stage of service innovation projects by synthetizing key literature. Based on the literature, we observe that (1) the intensity of user involvement in innovation framing is positively correlated with the perceived technological uncertainty; (2) collaboration between user and firm in innovation framing is more intensive in case of continuous involvement than in discrete involvement; (3) collaboration between user and firm in innovation framing is stronger in business to business setting than in business to user setting; (4) user involvement appears to positively affect the degree of acceptance of the proposal, the degree of implementation of the associated NSD project and innovation speed, and finally (5) the degree of user involvement has an inverted-U shaped relationship with the effectiveness of innovation framing.