This website and blog is intended to foster a community of business people and academics interested in service innovation and new service development. The goal is to advance the discussion of NSD and facilitiate communication between academics studying service innovation and those actually creating new services and innovating with service offerings.
From my research into new service development and innovation and from my experience in product development for service firms I believe that:
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Service innovation is different than traditional product development for goods,
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Service innovation is customer-centric, and
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Service innovation is an experiential process – trial and error, probe and learn, experimentation.
Since Eric von Hippel’s work on the customer-active paradigm of innovation in the mid-70s, much has been written about customer collaboration. A plethora of terms — co-creation, participatory marketing, distributed co-creation — point to the ubiquity of user and customer collaboration in innovation today. I believe that a couple factors caused a “tipping point” to be reached in this collaboration: (1) the continued growth of the services sector, now 83% of the US economy, and (2) the Internet.
Every Monday and Wednesday morning there will be a posting from me or from a guest author on a topical or long term theme in NSD or updates reacting to comments on posts or on current events or new articles.
The success of the effort will depend on interested parties who read and add their thoughts and comments. I appreciate any suggestions on how to make this site more effective:
ProfessorGary on Innovation and Marketing 
Gary,
I am honored you decided to follow me on Twitter. I should (and will be) following you. This site and area of study looks very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Jim
At any rate, the invocation is itself not a law, but merely like a prelude to the writing of the great legal minds which follows. ,
Thanks for following me. An interesting site. Will definitely be following you and contributing where I can add value.
Thank you! Very much appreciated….
I completely agree with the above comment, the internet is with a doubt growing into the most important medium of communication across the globe and its due to sites like this that ideas are spreading so quickly.
Gary, as an undergrad my BS emphasis was Organizational Innovation, which covered goods and services. Tongue in cheek, any organization that offers exceptional customer service, regardless the organization type, is being innovative. I will be completing my Masters of Science in Psychology in four weeks, with an emphasis on Organizational Psychology, and am currently working on the start-up of my business Essentials of Leadership (www.essentialsofleadership.com). My primary focus is employee and client retention through improved leader and employee development, including competencies. Your ideas of trying to develop innovative service ideas is spot on, and not so easy to do. What service is there that is not already being provided by someone, somewhere? But let’s keep the discussion moving, and perhaps collaborate on something for publication.