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The paper reviews the debate on innovation in services which has flourished over the last 20 years and suggests a research agenda for the services innovation literature. We discuss whether, and the extent to which, the ill-definition and mis-measurement of service output have influenced the conceptualization and analysis of innovation in services. We propose a reclassification of the literature according to whether it has been mainly assimilated or differentiated with respect to the traditional conceptualization of innovation in the manufacturing sector. We also review the integrative (or synthesizing) contributions, and suggest a taxonomy for the modes of innovation in services, based on the Lancasterian characteristics-based approach to product definition. We conclude with a summary of the key arguments and a proposed agenda for the evolutionary theory to integrate the conceptualization of innovation in services.

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International audienceService innovation was neglected for a long time, but by the first years of this century it was clear that some maturity had been reached. Innovation in the public sector has been even more neglected in the mainstream of innovation studies. This paper explores the scope for fruitful integration of work on this topic into innovation studies more generally. It examines four different theoretical perspectives used in studies of service innovation: assimilation, demarcation, inversion and integration/synthesis. Each of these throws light on particular issues confronting public services innovation, and we see that innovation in this sphere is highly diverse and that it does often display special features. But we conclude that these features do not constitute a strong case for studying public service innovation as if it were something sui generis, let alone continuing to neglect it. Instead, the case is made for developing more integrative views of innovation