A new vision is often the starting point for a radical innovation to start and bring to obtain a competitive advantage. However, the process of implementing it is not straightforward. This is especially critical in services, which, given their intangibility and subjectivity in the human touchpoints, insert a further layer of complexity in maintaining meaning integrity from the vision to the delivered solution. The service experience, in fact, cannot be directly controlled, leaving some room to co-creation mechanisms between service provider and customers. While the communication of the new vision at a strategic level can be effectively made through narratives and metaphors, the same cannot be said for the alignment toward the new practices at an operative level. This research directly aims at filling the gap, by understanding how a vision can be transferred to service personnel. Given its highly interactive nature and the high importance of customer experiences, we selected retail as the empirical setting. A single in-depth case study has been selected as the most appropriate methodology. Although qualitative and subject to interpretation, it allows for deeply digging into a social system, as a service organization, and to grasp all the details that allow such an innovation to be implemented. To minimize bias, 15 people from the company have been interviewed, through a semi-structured approach, and belonging to all the organizational levels. The interviews have been conducted and independently coded by 3 researchers. To analyze findings, the Normalization Process Theory (NPT, May, Finch, 2009) has been used, highlighting the steps (often recursive) that bring from the new meaning to the new daily practices adopted by front-line employees. Preliminary confirm the relevance of 3 critical phases in the embodying process: - The cognitive participation in the construction of specific elements of the service that people agree will be meaningful to customers. - The translation of the vision into a specific set of few practices. - The collective reflection about the appropriateness of the new practices and their scaling-up over different retail services. The study aims at contributing at the innovation literature, specifically regarding the vision and its link with the innovation process. Within this field, it opens the way toward the study of implementation, keeping the focus on the human factor in a critical setting as the retail service. From a practitioner point of view, it highlights the practices that allow the effective translation of a new vision into daily operations. In this way, it would help organizations in effectively implementing it by focusing on crucial activities in the transformation process.
Routinizing an innovation: from the vision to the new service daily practices
F. Artusi;E. Bellini
2019-01-01
Abstract
A new vision is often the starting point for a radical innovation to start and bring to obtain a competitive advantage. However, the process of implementing it is not straightforward. This is especially critical in services, which, given their intangibility and subjectivity in the human touchpoints, insert a further layer of complexity in maintaining meaning integrity from the vision to the delivered solution. The service experience, in fact, cannot be directly controlled, leaving some room to co-creation mechanisms between service provider and customers. While the communication of the new vision at a strategic level can be effectively made through narratives and metaphors, the same cannot be said for the alignment toward the new practices at an operative level. This research directly aims at filling the gap, by understanding how a vision can be transferred to service personnel. Given its highly interactive nature and the high importance of customer experiences, we selected retail as the empirical setting. A single in-depth case study has been selected as the most appropriate methodology. Although qualitative and subject to interpretation, it allows for deeply digging into a social system, as a service organization, and to grasp all the details that allow such an innovation to be implemented. To minimize bias, 15 people from the company have been interviewed, through a semi-structured approach, and belonging to all the organizational levels. The interviews have been conducted and independently coded by 3 researchers. To analyze findings, the Normalization Process Theory (NPT, May, Finch, 2009) has been used, highlighting the steps (often recursive) that bring from the new meaning to the new daily practices adopted by front-line employees. Preliminary confirm the relevance of 3 critical phases in the embodying process: - The cognitive participation in the construction of specific elements of the service that people agree will be meaningful to customers. - The translation of the vision into a specific set of few practices. - The collective reflection about the appropriateness of the new practices and their scaling-up over different retail services. The study aims at contributing at the innovation literature, specifically regarding the vision and its link with the innovation process. Within this field, it opens the way toward the study of implementation, keeping the focus on the human factor in a critical setting as the retail service. From a practitioner point of view, it highlights the practices that allow the effective translation of a new vision into daily operations. In this way, it would help organizations in effectively implementing it by focusing on crucial activities in the transformation process.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
