AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Services play a key role in today’s leading global economies. Companies are facing fierce competition, shortening development cycles of new technologies, and more demanding customer expectations. Innovation is a key driver for economic growth and competitive advantage. New technology is one of the largest sources for innovation, but IT is identified as the largest barrier to effective service development. Studies indicate that IT organizations are is ranked last as the source of new ideas and the CIOs are least involved in the screening decisions of ideas. The growing importance of service innovation and IT has created opportunities for IT organizations to contribute to more effective service introductions. IT organizations can provide their technical knowledge and contribute to selection of ideas on both technical feasibility and compliance with existing capabilities. Nonetheless, IT organizations are often pressured to remain facilitators or technology enablers as conceptual understanding and appropriate innovation mechanisms are missing. The objective of this research is to further develop the understanding of the mechanisms for IT organizational contributions to effective generation, selection and commercial evaluation of business service innovation projects. Understanding is supported with two conceptual frameworks on IT innovation capabilities and by comparing them to large Dutch companies in financial, communica- tion, media and high-technology industries in an electronic survey and two case study examples.