Creativity and innovation in the service sector

Despite the reciprocal relation between innovation and creativity, the literature also makes a clear distinction between them. Thus, innovation is often defined as the implementation of ideas, while creativity is related to the production of ideas (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004). In this vein, creativity is widely advocated as a critical antecedent of innovation (Amabile et al., 1996). Nevertheless, because of today’s rapidly changing business environments, heightened competition, shorter product life cycles and unpredictable technological change, both innovation and creativity are widely recognised as the most crucial competitive factors that can substantially support and foster an organisation’s survival and outstanding performance (e.g. Agarwal, Erramilli, & Dev, 2003). Simultaneously, technological advances and market changes are revolutionalising both the ways and the competences of the organisations, their stakeholders and networks to generate and implement innovative ideas (Kohler, Matzler, & Fuller, 2009). For example, new technologies and specifically, the social media enable firms not only to support but also to enrich and transform their innovation and creativity processes and performance (Fuller, Matzler, & Hoppe, 2008; Sigala, 2012a), empower customers and customer communities to more actively get engaged in and contribute to service innovation (Andreassen, Lervik Olsen, & Calabretta, 2015; Pitta & Fowler, 2005; Sigala, 2012b) and enrich the employees knowledge management processes and capabilities for boosting their creativity performance (Sigala & Chalkiti, 2015). Moreover, new theoretical lenses and approaches such as co-creation, Service Dominant Logic, service science as well as concepts such as co-creation, crowdsourcing and open innovation are challenging our conceptualisation about the design and provision of services, and this new thinking demands firms to revisit and update their service innovation processes (Ranaweera & Sigala, 2015; Trequa, in press). However, despite these new trends, technological tools and theoretical lenses, little is still understood about the affordances and the impacts of these changes on the innovation and creativity processes, performance and capabilities of firms, people and networks (Andreassen & Streukens, 2009; Sigala & Chalkiti, 2015). Moreover, there is an urgent need to develop and update knowledge as well as translate these theoretical concepts into actionable industry practices (Ranaweera & Sigala, 2015) on how new approaches and technology tools can be effectively exploited by service firms to improve their service innovation processes and outputs. Overall, research focusing on innovation has evolved around the examination of the following three topics: the sources of innovation, the drivers and context determining innovation and the innovation processes. Similarly, studies on creativity have also focused on investigating the same topics (Amabile, 1996). However, research nowadays is diverting from stage-gate to more flexible innovation and creativity models and processes (e.g. Fuglsang & Sørensen, 2011) that are informed and influenced by a multidisciplinary approach and thinking (e.g. knowledge management, learning theories and network science) (Hemphälä & Magnusson, 2012; Sigala & Chalkiti, 2015). This research change