Service Innovation Analytics: Leveraging Existing Unstructured Data to Assess Service Innovation Capability

The importance of innovation for firms for gaining competitive advantage has been widely acknowledged. Innovation in services exhibits some particular challenges. In order to support formal service innovation management, several frameworks of capabilities for service innovation have been published in recent years. However, these frameworks often do not support the use of existing information to apply them to a firm’s context and to guide managerial decisions. In this paper the authors aim to show that a firm’s service innovation capability can be operationally diagnosed with the help of such a framework in a more concrete way, using existing unstructured data. Building on established methods in text mining, the authors are working towards an approach to realise this. The paper outlines the approach and presents the encouraging results from our exploratory study, as well as avenues for further development of the approach and its implementation in a management information system. Service Innovation Analytics: Leveraging Existing Unstructured Data to Assess Service Innovation Capability