The critical incident technique and everyday innovation

This chapter presents the critical incident technique (CIT) and argues that CIT, when combined with other more ‘reflexive’ approaches, can provide an analysis of everyday experiences of services and make these experiences useful for innovation. The chapter seeks to place the critical incident technique in three different research traditions, with examples from services and innovation: positivist–functional, phenomenological–interpretivist and process-oriented reflexive. The value of the critical incident technique as a special interview and research technique for service innovation research is discussed.