Frontline employees' role in service innovation and value creation

Abstract

Frontline employees play a key role in service innovation and value creation. However, a detailed and structured understanding of how frontline employees contribute, and what types of roles they enact when involved in service innovation, is lacking. Hence, this thesis aims to explore frontline employees’ contributions to service innovation. The thesis consists of five empirical papers. Data has been collected from both private and public organizations via interviews, observations, documents, and innovation groups. The three main contributions of this thesis are as follows: Firstly, an extended understanding of how frontline employees contribute to service innovation. It was found that they contribute knowledge generated in three resource integration processes; value facilitation, value co-creation, and by learning from users’ value creation processes. Frontline employees are well equipped to draw on their knowledge and to integrate resources into new or developed value propositions, both during specific service innovation projects and in their day-to-day work practices. Secondly, when involved in service innovation, frontline employees enact different types of roles, e.g. as deliverers, as co-creators, and as negotiators. The third contribution, suggests that front line employees’ contributions to service innovation, as well as service innovation and value creation more generally, can be understood from three perspectives; i) an intra-organizational perspective following a goods-dominant logic, ii) an open-collective perspective, and iii) an open-conflictual perspective, where the latter two are informed by service-dominant logic. Thus, this thesis confirms, develops, and extends previous research by illuminating different ways of creating value and conducting service innovation, relating to frontline employees.

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