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The literature clearly indicates that service organizations are lagging behind their manufacturing counterparts in terms of the effective deployment of total quality management (TQM) practices aimed at achieving operational and strategic objectives. The objective of this study is to shed some light on the current TQM practices of service organizations. In general, the results of this study appear to confirm the reported literature findings concerning outcomes and benefits of effective TQM implementation. More importantly, the results underscore the differences in TQM implementation practices and benefits due to some industry‐specific factors. The lack of commitment to TQM implementation on the part of high percentage of the surveyed service organizations in this study is alarming.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature and the extent of moderation effect of the regulatory regime and competition, on the innovativeness-performance relationship among financial services firms. Based on the absorptive capacity theory, this study argues that firms must gather adequate knowledge from the external environment (specifically on regulatory systems and competitive landscape) to assist in developing competitive innovation strategies, and to realize the needed performance benefits from such strategies.

Data were collected from the Ghana’s financial services sector with a focus on banking and insurance institutions. Structural equation modeling and regression models were specified to test both the direct effects of variables of interest, and the moderation effects of environmental factors on the independent and dependent variables.

The results of the study show that both process and product innovativeness enhance financial services firms’ performance. While competition was found to stifle innovativeness, regulatory regime was found to promote innovativeness in financial services. Regulatory regime was also found to positively moderate the relationship between process innovativeness and performance, while competition was found to positively moderate the relationship between product innovativeness and performance.

The firms sampled are from an emerging economy with a growing financial services sector, and as a result, the findings may not apply to contexts with different economic characteristics.

This study asserts that in enhancing innovativeness in the financial services markets, firms must recognize the value of new external information on regulatory regime and competition as key environmental factors. Financial service firms must assimilate, transform, and apply such new knowledge in their innovation efforts in order to improve performance. For firms to fully benefit from their innovation, process innovativeness must be aligned with regulatory systems while product innovation yields best returns in competitive periods.

The combination of different knowledge sources has been considered conducive for innovation performance. While the literature has advanced regarding the combination of knowledge inputs as in internal and external research and development (R&D), the evolvement of knowledge blend from customers and competitors has also received substantial attention. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the sources of information from the customers into private and public and examine their direct effect on firm-level innovation. While the extant literature is mixed regarding this, no clear-cut results have emerged yet on the effect of knowledge combination from the private and public customers with internal R&D and human capital on innovation activities. This study, however, shed more lights on the inconclusiveness of the effect of knowledge diversity on firm-level innovation.

Using the microdata from the German Community Innovation Survey 2013, the authors employ a binary instrumental variable treatment model with Heckman selection, a suitable strategy to estimate binary variables to cope with a possible endogeneity issue.

The paper demonstrates that knowledge from customers in the private and public sector, and competitors are positively and significantly associated with innovation. The authors find evidence of a positive and significant effect of the combination of firm internal knowledge competencies with information from the public sector. In contrary, the blend of knowledge competencies with information from customers in the private sector and information from the competitors results in decline to innovation. The results also show that the blend of internal R&D with knowledge source from the customers in the public sector appears to have a stronger influence in the manufacturing sector than services. The results offer strong evidence of the positive link between knowledge diversity and firm-level innovation performance.

The results have significant managerial implications on the role of the blend of different sources of information in supporting a compelling internal knowledge development to optimise innovation performance.

This study is foremost to focus on knowledge sources from the customers in the public and private sector and its relationship with R&D and human capital in supporting a successful introduction of innovation.