Service innovation quality in healthcare: service innovativeness and organisational renewal as driving forces

Drawing on an integration of service-dominant (S-D) logic and the dynamic capabilities approach, this study focuses on the relatively under-researched issue of service innovation quality in healthcare services. We propose a conceptual framework for the relationships between user-induced and organisation-based renewal, and service innovation quality in the healthcare sector. By putting service innovativeness and organisational renewal at the input side of the healthcare organisations’ value creation process, and treating service innovation quality as an output, this study hypothesises direct relationships between these two ends. We conducted an empirical study in the Dutch healthcare sector. Based on data from 168 service innovation projects in Dutch healthcare organisations, the empirical study verifies these hypothesised relationships. The results reveal that both service innovativeness and organisational renewal are significant antecedents of quality improvement of the healthcare service innovations in these projects. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications for improving the quality of healthcare service innovations. The key managerial insight is that healthcare organisations are implicated to pay more attention to continuous renewal of value propositions to their users/patients, as well as to continuous renewal of their organisations’ functioning.