What Managers Should Know About Implementing a New Service Development Process

Growth is at the heart of most corporate strategies (Pidun, 2019). For a service firm, the continuing strategy of growth may well involve the development of innovative new services, which requires complex activities, multiple decisions and interactions, both internal and external. Such an intricate system of activities, to be sustained over time, will probably need underpinning by a formal innovation process. Such processes are often labelled New Service Development (NSD) approaches. There is guidance for managers embarking on NSD process as to what (normatively) should be done, but little guidance as to how to do it. As Barnes (2001) observed in the context of operations strategy, research has tended to concentrate on content (what is to be done) at the expense of process (how to do it). Guidance on this requires investigation to determine what formal innovation processes need to offer.