Abstract

The notion of service ought to be embedded in the psyche of those responsible for the design and delivery of service provision. Within an ever changing landscape, meeting customer expectations is a major priority for firms engaged
in service provision. Enhancing the service experience lies in the context of innovation and entrepreneurship. The focus of innovation within business should take into consideration the unexpected, the nature of incongruities,
process need and changes to structure. Innovation within service industries is widely recognised among researchers and practitioners as a key to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage. Increasingly, firms within service industries are placing new knowledge at the core of their strategies, especially knowledge about co-creation processes, knowledge of innovation and service design. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between service development and co-creation processes to better understand the complexity of service innovation. The paper will first outline the notion of service and the context of service innovation. It will present a
summarised view for management of service innovation. The paper will then move to illustrating how the creation and use of co-creation processes can be used to provide a shared understanding of what constitutes best practice.