Innovation and growth in KIBS: the role of clients’ collaboration and service customisation

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we analyse KIBS firms and posit that two core attributes of KIBS, namely collaborative relationships with clients and product customisation, foster the ability to develop successful, new product innovations. We disentangle the role of customisation and collaboration choices by looking at how they jointly affect the impact of innovation over firms’ performance, asking to what extent and how firms should collaborate with clients and customise their services. We test our hypotheses on a sample of Italian KIBS firms. Our results show that product innovations that are new to the industry are relevant and, counter intuitively, show that most growing KIBS firms do not have the highest service customisation and collaboration breadth with their clients. Most growing firms develop mass customisation strategies and they leverage on focused collaboration strategies with clients.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• growth
• KIBS
• clients’ collaboration
• service customisation

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Arnaldo Camuffo, Giovanni Costa, Andrea Furlan, Paolo Gubitta, Andrea Prencipe, Giuseppe Soda, Francesco Zirpoli, the participants of the Strategic Management Society Conference extension in Padova (2016), the participants of seminars at the University of Padova and at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice where earlier versions of this paper have been presented and two anonymous Reviewers for comments and suggestions on earlier versions. Research funded by University of Padova, Cà Foscari University of Venice and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo - Project of Excellence “Economics and Management of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services. Innovation Processes in Services And Competitiveness of Firms and Territories”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Both standard and modular service configurations introduce some degree of standardisation. The greatest degree of standardisation is found in the case of standard services, where a KIBS firm delivers a closed set of standard services, whereas in the case of modular services, each client can choose its own combination of standard services.

² In the questionnaire,KIBS firms were also asked to assess the percentage of partially customised, modular and standard services.

³ GLM results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo [Progetti di Eccellenza 2007];