Innovation in services: A comparative study of external learning processes in incremental and radical service innovation

This study present findings on external learning processes in service innovation projects and show how such processes operate in incremental and radical innovation projects. While research on product innovation has revealed already first valuable insights (e.g. Lane & Lubatkin, 1998; Jansen et al., 2005), in service innovation literature, external learning still belongs to one of least researched topics (Sundbo, 2000; Stevens & Dimitriadis, 2004), although several researchers have called for more research in this domain (e.g. Spohrer, 2008; Lane et al., 2006). This is surprising, as due to differences in the ease with which service firms may identify and exploit external information (Mendonca et al., 2004), patterns of absorbing external information may be shaped differently particularly in services innovation. In order to answer these questions, is conducted case study research in the retail banking sector in Germany and Spain.