R Epresentation Problems in Service Innovation – C Omments Based on a Survey

The paper takes its starting point in a survey from a research project on “Service Development, Internationalisation and Competence Development.” The survey was sent to 2,870 Danish service firms within 59 industries. 623 firms from 49 industries responded, corresponding to 21.7 percent of the population. In addition to this survey, the paper also refers to existing research within the field of technological innovation and service innovation and a few preliminary case-studies. The paper shows that technological change clearly is important for service innovation in Danish service firms. Especially important are new information and communication technologies (ICTs). Against this background, the paper discusses the character of the impact of technology on service innovation, compared to other contingency factors, and what this means for employment and user involvement in services. The connection between technological innovation and service innovation can be analysed in terms of a concept of “production network”. Production networks consist of technical functions and actor roles. They mutually define positions for each other. These positions can be seen as steps in the production process. Our argument is that new information and communication technologies contain technical functions that – because of the “digital representation” – make the representation of services more “bendable.” One result of this is that the “generic style” of the producer is devalued as an asset (cf. the concept of “style” developed by Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1986)). In return the value of the accessibility of the service for the user increases, i.e. the ability to be “close by” and “easy to capture” and understand. This we call the representation problem of services. How the representation problem is confronted can be analysed from different angles. We want to stress what we call the credibility principle and the accountability principle and competing representation systems that sustain the accessibility for the user.