Adopting a «practice lens» to understand Service Innovation: the contribution of Organizational Routines Research

Increasing academic research focus on service innovation from diverse disciplines and perspectives. Emergent stage of theory building on service innovation and the current struggle to understand «what is service innovation?». The aim of the paper is to build up the foundations for a new conceptualization of service innovation based on a "practice lens" and, specifically, on the concept of "organizational routines". In detail, it provides a unifying perspective on the sources of «novelty» (a synonym of «change») and «stabilization» (a requisite for «replication») of neo-Schumpeterian service innovation. To this end, we carried on a critical review of studies on service marketing and management and on organizational routines pointing, in particular, to the contribution of "practice-based" research. By exploiting the empirical advances of organizational research on routines the work sheds light on a number of mechanisms producing «change» («novelty») and «stabilization» in service innovation dynamics. In particular, the authors point out that as new routines carried out to produce and deliver the service become recognizable and stabilize over time, they contain the «seed» for service replication. The new conceptualization of SI helps to understand the interdependences existing among different dimensions of service innovation as well as between deliberation and emergence within service innovation processes.