Abstract:

 Service innovation, which has been under research since Schumpeter’s time, still remains as a vague concept. Because different options on the essence of service innovation exist among scholars, no agreement on the definition of service innovation has been reached. Despite of studies abundantly made in the scope of service innovation, conclusions diverge, leading to the research “bottleneck”. The development course and the content of the service innovation researches is yet to be clarified due to lack of related studies and systematic literature review. Employing the method of concept clarification, this research, through a systematic and comprehensive review on service innovation literature during the period of 19962016, clarifies the development course and summarizes the content and categories of the researches under discussion. The research findings include: (1) the researches during the current period, taking Schumpeter’s innovation theory as the step stone, carried out the exploration from a socalled “inward perspective”; (2) most researches focused on the following four themes: degree of change, category of change, newness of change, and source of change; (3) the researches during the current period paid inadequate attention to value cocreation, ignoring the necessity and importance of profit return brought by service innovation. Based on these findings, the paper evaluates the service innovation researches during the current period by identifying the main trend and major problems and weaknesses, and presents the following recommendations: service innovation needs to be reexamined by shifting from the “inward perspective” to the “outward perspective” based on customer experience and value cocreation; the forthcoming researches should change current cognitive logic to make indepth research. The paper, besides making up the deficiency of literature reviewbased research, sheds light on the solutions to the bottleneckrelated problems of research development, and provides the service industries, especially highend service industries in China, with some preparative foundation and theoretical references.

Key words: Supplyside Structural Reform, highend service industries, value cocreation, customer experience, inward and outward perspective, service innovation