service innovations

Today, innovations are perceived as the crucial factor for economic growth and employment. Companies investing heavily into research and development for technologically innovative products seem to have a competitive edge. This finding is empirically proved. However, further promising innovation strategies do exist. Based on a survey of 1450 companies of the manufacturing sector this article shows that also companies focussing on intelligent product service combinations or innovative techno-organisational processes outperform their competitors as regards employment growth.

Innovations are significant corporate challenges - and this is particularly the case with companies offering services. This article offers up to date results of an ongoing research project. It describes in detail a case of the way of a medium-sized company from a producer to service leadership, from the ini-tial situation via central challenges up to the current approach of a corporate university as engine and enabling context for permanent innovating of services.

Performance contracting changes the way of cooperation between customer and supplier substantially and turns a former product business into a service business. Both from supplier’s and customer’s point of view several reasons exist why to adopt contracting solutions. The actual market adoption, however, is still moderate. After the introduction of the peculiarities of performance contracting, this paper deals with the causes of market resistance and the most important barriers of launching the respective solutions. Based on empirical observations proposals are developed in order to overcome the resistance.