B2B Service Innovation: How Business Customers Perceive Firm Innovativeness

Both academia and industry unanimously agree on the pivotal role of innovation in driving sustainable economic growth. Business-to-Business (B2B) services constitute a substantial portion of the global economy. The relative magnitude of the B2B market, in comparison with the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) market, is larger in terms of revenues, profits, assets, and overall value. Primarily, innovation in B2B service research has predominantly centered around knowledge and technology within the manufacturing industry, where the commercialization of ideas, in the form of new product development, is deemed as innovation. More precisely, B2B innovations have undergone analysis and discussion across various dimensions and categories, often with a primary focus on the core product. Generally, a firm-centric perspective has prevailed in defining innovation, while the manner in which customers perceive a firm’s innovativeness has been understated. The objective of this chapter is to propose a framework for categorizing B2B innovation features into six distinct types. By introducing the notion of an innovation dimension continuum, we elucidate how varying degrees of basic, advanced, and ecosystem integration solutions impact business customers’ perception of a firm’s innovativeness.