Cooperation for Innovation in Services: An Economic Approach to the Theory of Innovation Networks in the Service Industries

Services play a major role for wealth creation and employment in all European economies. The modern service industries are knowledge-intensive, the services produced are complex and the actors involved in the production of services are heterogeneous. Most important trends characterizing the development in service industries include the increasing modularization of services, the increasing importance of the introduction of novelties as well as new organizational forms for the division of labour between private and public actors in service innovation processes.
In economics research so far is strongly biased towards innovation in manufacturing, only a few attempts exist to develop a self-contained economic theory of innovation for the service industries. The same can be said on economic research on the organization of innovation processes in the service industries. In public sector economics, due to the typical service characteristics of public goods, the peculiarities of services were always central. However, the most recent trends in services encompassing in particular the cooperation between public and private actors in service innovation are not yet investigated.
Our ServPPin-Project places collaboration between public and private actors in service innovation processes central. To do this we develop in this working package a theory of public-private service innovation networks. For this purpose the literature on innovation processes and innovation networks is surveyed and complemented by the rare approaches focusing on service industries. To include the perspective of public economics also the approaches from New Public Management are incorporated into our theoretical framework of the ServPPin-Project.
The ServPPin-Synthesis finally is embedded into broader economic approaches to analyze innovation processes and economic development. In particular, the theories of innovation systems as well as the theory of technological regimes are well suited for an immediate integration of our service-oriented theories. This demonstrates the broad connectivity of our theoretical framework to the state-of-the-art approaches in innovation economics.