Organizational routines, practice and the emergence of service innovation

The article uses a longitudinal case study analysis to understand the micro-dynamics explaining the emergence of service innovation over time. We build on the common nature - processual and interactive - of services and organizational routines and rely on practice-based theorizing to show how service innovation develops over time as intertwined cycles of "perceiving breakdowns", "emerge of novelty" and "stabilizing aspects of practice". Specifically, the case study analysis shows how novelty emerges through service work practices in a variety of forms (experimentation, improvisation bricolage and continuous adaptation) and domains of the service provision routine (rule-following, technology use, knowing and social patterning) and how replicability in service innovation is realized through stabilizing mechanisms that simultaneously work within all the complementary domains in which practice can be disentangled. Indeed, stability is at the basis of reproducibility that, in turn, is required for any innovation to happen.