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Service firms need to continuously innovate their service offerings in order to remain competitive in constantly changing market conditions. Successful innovators utilise current information technology (IT) to access service innovation capacity and knowledge which can be located internal or external to their organisation. In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that explains how IT can contribute to service innovation performance, and finally, to service provision performance. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, we differentiate between sensing (SN), seizing (SZ), and transformation (TF) as the key abilities in service innovation. With our theoretical model, we can explain almost 40% of the variance in service innovation performance (SIP) (R2 = 0.3955) and provide evidence for the multi-faceted and significant effects of IT. In particular, we are able to show a significant influence of inter-organisational IT support on SN and SZ abilities while organisational IT support has a significant impact on TF abilities.

In recent years the proliferation of a new technological evolution has aroused great interest from science and practice: social media. Subsuming different types of online applications where users can create, edit and share content, social media enables new forms of interaction with others. Organisations already recognise its relevance and start leveraging on it. Furthermore, organisations identify the role of service innovation as one major driver for economic growth and competitive advantage. Nevertheless, although social media affords organisations to interact with their customers, the potential for utilising it for improving their service innovation activities is almost unexploited yet. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a framework for supporting the use of social media affordances for service innovation. Its applicability is tested in the domain "government". Based on theoretical constructs a conceptual analysis is presented, tested in a specific domain and supplemented by potential future research and implications for theory and practice.

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