From vision to innovation: new service development through front-line employee engagement

This article investigates how service companies might engage frontline employees in transforming a market vision into a new service routine. This is a major challenge given the separation between those making decisions at the managerial level and those interacting with customers, ultimately enabling the service experience. Through interviews and observations, we capture the mechanisms and practices that emerged in an in-depth case study of a radical service innovation anchored in a new market vision. Our findings show that frontline employee engagement in the innovation process has to be triggered by managers, thereafter unfolding naturally in cycles of proactive behaviour and experimentation. The emerging routinisation process allows transitioning from the definition of a new vision to new routines through guiding and building on employees’ experience and proactive behaviour, institutionalising the new practices that ultimately lead to radical service innovation. This study contributes to the service innovation literature by merging two very different sources of knowledge, namely vague, intangible, and radically new visions, and practical and tacit frontline employee experiences usually associated with incremental innovation.