Services, innovation, capabilities, and policy: Toward a synthesis and beyond

Abstract

With innovation scholars being increasingly interested in services, the debate on why and how to formulate innovation policy for services is more urgent than ever. An appropriate response to ongoing servitization requires a thorough understanding of the interwoven nature of goods and services. This article provides an up-to-date overview of policy strategies fitting an all-encompassing ‘synthesis’ perspective on innovation. We distinguish two emerging views on the role of services in novelty creation. Each view conveys distinct policy approaches for solving insufficient supply or demand of service capabilities (required for creating and delivering services). The subject-oriented perspective suggests improving interactions involving the use of available capabilities. The object-oriented perspective aims to enhance the development of lacking capabilities. Following this novel distinction in synthesis perspectives, we propose a framework of associated policy instruments and illustrate it with the case of the Dutch province of Limburg. We conclude by discussing further research possibilities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.