Driving service innovativeness via collaboration with customers and suppliers: Evidence from business-to-business services

Abstract

Service innovativeness represents a key source of competitive advantage and a research priority. However, empirical evidence about how service firms successfully offer novel and meaningful services is scarce, particularly in the context of business-to-business (B2B) service firms. Drawing on the B2B collaborative perspective and KBV, we aim to investigate when customer and supplier collaboration are more beneficial to drive service novelty and meaningfulness. Using data of 186 B2B service firms, the results reveal that collaboration with customers and suppliers are not equally beneficial to drive both novelty and meaningfulness and their outcomes can be amplified or lost under specific conditions. Customer collaboration is more beneficial to increase novelty in the presence of exploratory learning and employee collaboration. Contrary, supplier collaboration drives novelty only at higher levels of exploratory learning. Further, supplier collaboration is more beneficial to improve meaningfulness at higher levels of employee collaboration. Finally, the positive outcomes of both customer and supplier collaboration disappear in the presence of knowledge tacitness. Our findings provide new insights about drivers and contingencies that affect different aspects of service innovativeness.

Innovation at the Service Encounter in Knowledge Intensive Business Services: Antecedents and Boundary Conditions

“…This knowledge is a prerequisite of any customized solution delivered during the service encounter (Landry et al, ). Knowledge about customers' requirements is tacit in nature and not accessible from any other sources because it resides within the customer (Heirati and Siahtiri, ; Jacob, ). During communication with customers this tacit knowledge is codified.…”

“…Extensive knowledge about customer preferences and priorities enables FLEs to determine what additional skills and knowledge are required to advance their performance instead of guessing based on their personal experiences. Moreover, customers are usually a good source of information about where and how to access the required knowledge and skills to solve the problem, because they possess extensive market knowledge (Heirati and Siahtiri, ). Therefore,

H1: Customer communication is positively related to FLEs' (a) creativity and (b) customer orientation .

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“…Internal communication improves FLEs' creativity and bolsters customer orientation. When employees share their knowledge and experiences inside the firm, they improve and leverage their personal knowledge and awareness and consequently generate more new ideas that can be used in supporting service innovation (Heirati and Siahtiri, ; Kim and Lee, ). Internal communication increases the cognitive capacities of FLEs, enabling them to demonstrate creativity in solving ill‐defined, complex problems (Carmeli et al, ).…”

“…Further, internal communication enhances FLEs' customer orientation as FLEs learn from each other regarding new skills and knowledge required to identify customer needs. Internal communication also enables FLEs to resolve ambiguity around customer needs and priorities as FLEs accumulate experience through the service encounters (Heirati and Siahtiri, ). The synergetic effect of internal communication facilitates the exploitation of experience and expertise of individual employees, which can have a positive impact on FLE creativity and customer orientation.…”

“…However, customers may lack the expertise to communicate their problem clearly. Internal communication overcomes the problem of comprehending knowledge coming from customers as it allows FLEs to upgrade and transform their knowledge bases and adopt new behaviors (Heirati and Siahtiri, ; Hirst et al, ). As such, customer and internal communications complement each other by overcoming their inherent shortcomings and advance both FLEs' creativity and customer orientation behaviors at the service encounter.…”