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Technology-enabled business-to-business (B2B) services contribute the largest share to GDP growth and are fundamental for an economy’s value creation. This article aims to identify key service- and digital technology-driven B2B innovation modes and proposes a research agenda for further exploration.

This conceptual paper adopts a techno-demarcation view on service innovation, encompassing three core dimensions: service offering (the service product, or the “what”), service process (the “how”) and service ecosystem (the “who/for whom”). It delineates the implications of three digital technologies – the internet-of-things (IoT), intelligent automation (IA) and digital platforms – for service innovation across these core dimensions in B2B markets.

Digital technology has immense potential ramifications for value creation by reshaping all three core dimensions of service innovation. Specifically, IoT can transform physical resources into reconfigurable service products, IA can augment and automate a rapidly expanding array of service processes, while digital platforms provide the technical and organizational infrastructure for the integration of resources and stakeholders within service ecosystems.

This study suggests an agenda with six themes for further research, each linked to one or more of the three service innovation dimensions. They are (1) new recurring revenue models, (2) service innovation in the metaverse, (3) scaling up service innovations, (4) ecosystem innovations, (5) power dependency and lock-in effects and (6) security and responsibility in digital domains.

This paper aims at better understanding the intention to adopt service innovation in a business context by analyzing the nature of perceived value.

This research uses Holbrook's approach on value, applied to a B2B context, in order to better understand the nature of the perceived value of a new service. A qualitative study on 33 firms is carried out through two steps: an exploratory stage and an understanding stage.

The results show different aspects of the service innovation value in a business market, identify various recipients of this value, and underline how the level of newness in the service impacts the nature of perceived value. More generally, this research provides an analytical framework of service innovation value for a firm in a B2B market.

This study aims at broadening previous research that studied the perceived value of offerings in a B2B context by considering various types of perceived value of a service innovation. Also, Holbrook's frame of analysis was adapted to the B2B context. In order to make the conclusions more relevant, it would be necessary to enlarge the sample, introduce other service innovations and to carry out a quantitative study.

To market their service innovation, companies can adopt a positioning on other criteria than price or quality/performance and communicate with various recipients.

The paper highlights the diversity of components of service innovation value (not only economic and functional components but also emotional, symbolic, altruistic, interactional components of value).

Drawing on the resource-based view, this paper aims to extend prior information technology (IT) B2B service research by building and empirically testing a theoretical model in which organizational agility mediates the relationship between organizational capabilities (IT capability and organizational learning) and service innovation performance, under conditions of entrepreneurial alertness.

The theoretical hypotheses are confirmed by partial least squares analysis of survey responses collected from 170 IT B2B service firms.

The results reveal that the effect of either IT capability or organizational learning on service innovation performance is fully mediated by organizational agility, and organizational agility has a greater impact on service innovation performance under a high level of entrepreneurial alertness than under a low level.

The results of this study provide specific managerial guidelines for how to effectively manage organizational mechanisms to enhance IT B2B service innovation performance.

This study contributes to the literature of service innovation, IT B2B (industrial) marketing and dynamic capability by providing theory-driven and empirically proven explanations to help managers better understand the IT capability-service innovation relationship from the perspective of organizational mechanisms (organizational agility, organizational learning and entrepreneurial alertness).

This study aims to explore how information technology (IT) companies that provide professional information systems/IT solutions to business clients can enhance employees’ service innovation performance.

Self-reported data were collected from 251 employees over two periods, along with their supervisor-reported data. The model was tested using structural equation modeling.

Employees’ engagement fully mediates the impact of innovative self-efficacy and social identification on service innovation performance. Employees’ customer orientation and feeling trusted both strengthen the transformation of service innovation engagement into service innovation performance. However, IT employees’ embeddedness, unexpectedly, significantly weakens the link between engagement and performance in business-to-business (B2B) service innovation contexts.

The sample was collected in Taiwan, where the IT industry is dominant and employees’ values and team interactions are influenced by Chinese culture. Data drawn from a single industry, involving a particular culture, limit claims of external validity.

Managers can encourage participative decision-making, or hold official platforms where peers and clients can exchange ideas, leading to higher levels of feeling trusted and customer orientation, which both strengthen the link between service innovation engagement and performance. Moreover, highly embedded members can easily discuss novel ideas with team members and obtain improvement-oriented feedback, which ensures highly embedded members can keep focusing on service innovation.

This study provides a more nuanced picture of predictive factors for individual innovation behavior in B2B service innovation contexts in which employees provide business clients with professional, innovative IT solutions through team-based projects.

This study aims to explore how manufacturing firms master customer lock-in through value creation by servitization innovation strategies from the perspective of asset specificity.

A multiple case study with triangulation fashion is adopted to identify servitization innovation strategies. Several manufacturing firms were investigated, which are distributed in different positions of the value chain. Content analysis and abductive approaches are adopted to analyze the data. Moreover, an in-depth interview and participatory observation were conducted to refine the analysis results.

This study identified four different focusing points of servitization operations. Based on these, the paper further induces an innovative servitization strategy matrix of customer lock-in, concerning communion, intellectual, existential and insubstantial strategies. Furthermore, a conceptual model of customer lock-in by servitization innovation from the perspective of asset specificity is elaborated. It is suggested that companies can use tangible or intangible resources by sharing or storing operations to create servitization value.

This study theoretically proposes a conceptual model to extend servitization innovation as an intangible asset and adopt the new perspective of asset specificity to illustrate the value creation in servitization to generate customer lock-in.

The business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature is heavily focused on the manufacturing sector. However, it is the B2B service sector that shows the highest growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Beyond a vibrant stream of literature on servitization, the B2B literature has neglected drawing on the wider service literature. This paper aims to examine recent streams of service research that have promising implications and research opportunities for B2B marketing.

Together, the author team has decades of research, managerial and executive teaching experience related to B2B marketing and services marketing and management. The observations and reflections in this paper originate from this unique perspective and are supplemented by insights from 16 expert interviews.

The authors identify and discuss in this paper four broad and related themes from the service literature that can stimulate B2B research and practice. First, the authors highlight the implications for capturing value in economies with their rapidly increasing specialization and related growth in B2B services. Specifically, the authors explain where B2B firms should focus on to gain bargaining power in the value chains of the future. Second, an additional strategy to enhance a B2B firm’s power to capture value is servitization, which allows firms to get closer to their customers, increase their switching costs and build strategic partnerships. The authors explore how firms can use service productization to enhance their chances of successful servitization. Third, servitization is expensive, and productivity and scalability are often a challenge in B2B contexts. These issues are tackled in a recent service research stream on cost-effective service excellence (CESE) where the authors derive implications for B2B firms. Fourth and related to CESE, latest developments in intelligent automation offer exciting opportunities for B2B services to be made more scalable.

This paper is based on the unique perspective of the author team and a panel of experts and connects major streams of service research to the B2B literature.

The research first and uniquely explores the antecedent relationship among three highly studied environmental forces – competitive intensity (CI), market turbulence (MT) and technological turbulence (TT) – in a service context. Next, given the importance of services to the USA and global gross domestic product (GDP) and the unique characteristics of services versus product firms, the research examines the impact of environmental forces on innovation speed capability, a less studied but critical enabler of service innovation. Finally, this study aims to suggest the importance of the sequential relationship between two dynamic capabilities – innovation speed and operational flexibility – to realize advantage.

This study surveyed 264 US service firms in a business to business context and tested this research model using structural equation modeling.

The results yielded three major conclusions: in a service context when examining the relationship among the three environmental forces, CI appears to have the driving influence on MT and TT, MT, however, was the only environmental force that this study found to bare positive and significant direct influence on innovation speed. Looking at the zero-order effect of MT and TT on innovation speed this study found each to be positive and significant suggesting a negative suppression effect and innovation speed’s influence on performance relative to competitors is fully mediated by operational flexibility.

The paper contributes to context, as service firms represent the majority of the USA and global GDP. This study extends the literature on the highly studied environmental forces (MT, TT and CI) by examining how they influence each other in an antecedent role and in service context. This study extends service literature by going beyond the influence of environmental forces on innovation to examine the dynamic capability of innovation speed, suggested as uniquely important to service context and distinct from the more highly studied innovation construct. The study also extends prior research in the manufacturing (product) context that suggests the importance of sequential congruence between two critical dynamic capabilities – innovation speed and operational flexibility – necessary to deliver competitive advantage.

This study recognizes service as the majority contributor to global and US gross domestic product and the importance of innovation speed to service innovation. Generating innovative products and services at a faster rate generates advantages for business-to-business (B2B) service organizations in keeping up with and moving ahead of rivals. This study aims to introduce the concept of capacity for social exchange (CSE) in buyer–supplier relationships, which reflects the degree to which individuals possess competencies that enable the exchange of information, and this study also explores how CSE affects knowledge sharing and innovation speed within a supply chain organization.

The sampling frame of this research consisted of service businesses in the USA. The data were collected through Zoomerang, an online survey research firm where the B2B panel of Zoomerang formed the sampling frame. The data was collected from 264 B2B service sector executives.

The key findings are as follows: CSE facilitates knowledge sharing; knowledge sharing is positively related to innovation speed; and the relationship between CSE and innovation speed is fully mediated by knowledge sharing. Additional analysis reveals that knowledge channels which are designed as boundary-spanning strategies used to transfer and create knowledge between business units, directly increase – and positively moderate – the relationship between CSE and innovation speed.

This study addresses the gap in literature focused on micro-level influencers on innovation. This study sets out by presenting the concept of CSE, and this study addresses limitations in prior work by examining the research questions.

Big data analytics (BDA) is becoming a strategic tool to harness data to achieve business efficiencies. While business-to-customer organizations have adopted BDA, its adoption in business-to-business (B2B) has been slow, raising concerns about the lack of understanding of the need to adopt BDA. Little knowledge exists on the subject and the purpose of this study is to examine BDA adoption needs among B2B organizations.

A systematic literature review (SLR) following the six-step SLR guidelines of Templier and Paré (2015) involved 1,051 articles, which were content analyzed.

The authors offer two-pronged findings. First, on the basis of the SLR, the authors develop a new four-category classification scheme of needs to adopt BDA and present a consolidated review of the current knowledge base along with these categories (i.e. innovation, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and digital transformation). Second, underpinned by the theory of organizational motivation and literature evidence, the authors develop propositions and a corresponding model of BDA adoption needs. The authors show that BDA adoption among B2B organizations is driven by the need to augment customer lifetime value, champion the change, improve managerial decision cycle-time, tap into social media benefits and align with market transformation.

The results facilitate theory development as the study creates a new classification scheme of needs and a model of needs to adopt BDA in large B2B organizations.

The findings will serve as a guideline framework for managers to examine their BDA adoption needs and strategize its adoption.

The study develops a new four-category classification scheme for understanding B2B organizations’ needs to adopt big data analytics. The study also develops a new model of needs which will serve as a stepping stone for the development of a theory of needs of technology adoption.

This paper aims to examine the factors that affect the adoption of technological innovations in a service industry, like the higher education industry. Specifically, the use of Web-based technology (WEBCT/blackboard) by faculty and administrators in universities in Egypt in the delivery of educational material and communication with students and peers is the focus of this study.

A distinctive business-to-business (B2B) model is developed drawing on Rogers’ innovation adoption model, the resource-based view of the firm, as well as theoretical and empirical foundations in previous innovation adoption literature. The model is testified drawing on the results of empirical work in the form of a large survey conducted on 200 faculty and administrators in two different universities in Egypt. Structural equation modeling is used to test the research model.

In addition to the attributes of the innovation, all university-based factors as well as one service provider factor, namely, need for interaction, were identified to have a significant influence on the adoption of technological innovations in the higher education industry.

This paper attempts to enhance current understanding of the adoption of innovations in an important industry like the higher education industry. Empirical results shed light on influential factors when adopting technological innovations by faculty and administrators in the higher education industry. This is the first empirical study of this type to be conducted in the Middle East.