Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emerging crowd-funding phenomenon, that is a collective effort by consumers who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet, in order to invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Successful service businesses that organize crowd-funding and act as intermediaries are emerging, attesting to the viability of this means of attracting investment. Design/methodology/approach -The research employs a "grounded theory" approach, performing an in-depth qualitative analysis of three cases involving crowd-funding initiatives: SellaBand in the music business, Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in non-profit services. These cases were selected to represent a diverse set of crowd-funding operations that vary in terms of risk/return for the investor and the type of payoff associated to the investment. Findings -The research addresses two research questions: how and why do consumers turn into crowd-funding participants? and how and why do service providers set up a crowd-funding initiative? Concerning the first research question, the authors' findings reveal purposes, characteristics, roles and tasks, and investment size of crowd-funding activity from the consumer's point of view. Regarding the second research question, the authors' analysis reveals purposes, service roles, and network effects of crowd-funding activity investigated from the point of view of the service organization that set up the initiative. Practical implications -The findings also have implications for service managers interested in launching and/or managing crowd-funding initiatives. Originality/value -The paper addresses an emerging phenomenon and contributes to service theory in terms of extending the consumer's role from co-production and co-creation to investment.

Research to date on service innovation is rooted primarily in traditional new product development focusing on tangible goods. In this article, the authors invoke insights from the emerging service-dominant logic (SDL) perspective and propose a conceptual framework for investigating the antecedents and consequences of service innovation. They then develop a set of hypotheses pertaining to potential predictors of two distinct facets of service innovation (volume and radicalness) and the impact of the latter on two measures of firm performance (revenue growth and profit growth). They test their proposed model using data from a sample of luxury hotels and find that (a) collaborating with customers fosters innovation volume but not radicalness (and vice versa for collaborating with business partners); (b) a firm’s customer orientation—both directly and in interaction with innovative orientation—contributes to innovation radicalness; (c) collaborating with contact employees enhances both innovation volume and radicalness; (d) the use of knowledge integration mechanisms contributes to innovation radicalness (but not volume); and (e) both innovation outcomes have significant but somewhat different effects on the two performance measures. They discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of their findings and conclude with the study’s limitations and directions for further research.

Service innovation is a primary source of competitive advantage and a research priority. However, empirical evidence about the impact of innovativeness on new service adoption is inconclusive. A plausible explanation is that service innovation has thus far been studied using new product frameworks that do not fully capture the complexity of new service assessments by customers. We propose a different, holistic framework, which posits that new service adoption does not depend on individual service attributes, but on specific configurations of such attributes. We investigate this framework in a luxury hotel service context, using qualitative comparative analysis, a set-membership technique that is new to service research and suitable for configuration analyses. Results confirm that individual service attributes have complex trade-off effects and that only specific combinations of attributes act as sufficient conditions for new service adoption. Moreover, the composition of such combinations differs according to the different coproduction requirements. Our findings contribute to managerial practice by providing new insights for improving the service-development process and the launch strategy for new services. They also augment extant service knowledge by demonstrating why interdependencies among various innovation attributes are important to consider for gaining an accurate understanding of new service adoption.

The management literature is paying increasing attention to the phenomenon of imitation. However, there are several gaps in understanding what drives firms' imitative behaviors. Furthermore, a fragmented array of disciplinary perspectives has investigated imitation phenomena in the past. This paper reviews the literature on imitation and offers a unifying framework to understand what theory has said about the predictors of imitative behaviors, in terms of purposes, driving forces and target. At the end of the review, two over-arching rationales for imitation seem to emerge: risk reduction and search for effectiveness. Next, the review distinguishes between what drives the general propensity for imitation of a firm and what makes a specific decision more likely to be imitated by the same firm. Implications and indications for future research are offered in the final section.