Integration of innovative users as source of service innovations

In this study we research user integration in the German service industry. Goal is to explorethe industrial practice with regard to four dimensions of user integration, i.e., why, whom,how, and how successful the service industry integrates to find novel service ideas. Data iscollected from a large-scale survey sent out to 2,905 service companies and posted in varioususer groups related to service innovations.Drawing from data gathered from 301 respondents in our study, we present explorativefindings for each distinct dimension of user integration. To better understand the interrelationof these dimensions, we also create a structural equation model using partial least square forestimation of direction and strength of relationships between those.Results show that service companies like companies from other industries actively pursue thedevelopment of radical innovations. We find that service companies do not integrate users byrandom. Instead a service company's level of importance for radical innovation significantlydetermines both, choice of users integrated as well as choice of integration instrumentsdeployed.In our study we can also show, that many of the beliefs...