Research and Development (R&D) is underestimated in services. This article combines deductive and inductive approaches in order to formulate a new definition of R&D. However, the proposed revision does not fundamentally alter the structure of the current definition. The OECD definition is only marginally amended by making explicit certain implicit or insufficiently highlighted characteristics, in particular the importance of the social sciences and humanities and of design and development or organisational engineering, the composite nature of projects, etc. Our objective, indeed, is to attain a certain 'psychological' threshold that would mark our emancipation from the inertia of the still dominant industrialist and technologist approaches. As William Baumol (2002) rightly points out in a provocatively titled paper ("Services as leaders and the leader of services"), not only is research and development a service activity but it also, and most importantly, occupies a privileged position among such activities. However, despite this commonality, and despite R&D"s strategic importance,
Economic theory has recently begun to emphasize the incomplete nature of contracts that link economic agents possessing asymmetric information. Such conditions are particularly frequent in the case of market relations where knowledge, expertise and, more generally, products which are difficult for either side to value are exchanged. Within such a framework, our aim is to analyse two, linked, questions: how does the client firm select its service providers, and why and how does the firm value an intellectual service such as consultancy, and appraise quality and value where no quantifiable criteria or indicators are available?In the first section, we will show how the questions of selection and evaluation are distinctive in the case of consultancy activities, and allude to the underlying difficulties. These include situations of asymmetry of information in favour of the service provider, and of uncertainty on quality and its objective measurement. From a theoretical point of view, this encapsulates the economics of quality, agency theory and the economics of incentives more generally.The second section is based on 20 interviews carried out among consultancy professionals, allowing us to describe the principal methods of selection and evaluation that exist for consultancy activities, with a particular focus on the process. The final section analyses market responses to information asymmetries and the problems of selection and evaluation of consultancy activities.
The "specificity" of services and the question of selection and evaluationThe selection and evaluation of service providers are important issues (even for service providers themselves, who need to know the methods and procedures of selection and evaluation used by their clients in order, for example, to adopt an appropriate marketing strategy). Although selection and evaluation are often treated separately in the management literature, they are in fact difficult to separate. Evaluation is a dynamic, relational process which takes place throughout the duration of service provision. Within this overall process, choice, selection and evaluation are linked.
Résumé L’innovation dans le tourisme est souvent assimilée à l’introduction de TIC. Dès lors, beaucoup de travaux se focalisent sur les impacts de cette introduction sur les différentes dimensions de l’organisation touristique. Nous montrons ici que ces réflexions en termes d’impacts sont trop restrictives et nous envisageons d’autres types de relations (de substitution, de détermination, d’identité, de diffusion ou encore de production). Enfin dans une dernière étape, nous analysons en détail les différentes modalités d’organisation de l’innovation et du processus d’innovation dans les activités touristiques.
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