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

Abstract

Research and Development (R&D) is underestimated in services. This article combines deductive and inductive approaches in order to formulate a new definition of R&D. However, the proposed revision does not fundamentally alter the structure of the current definition. The OECD definition is only marginally amended by making explicit certain implicit or insufficiently highlighted characteristics, in particular the importance of the social sciences and humanities and of design and development or organisational engineering, the composite nature of projects, etc. Our objective, indeed, is to attain a certain 'psychological' threshold that would mark our emancipation from the inertia of the still dominant industrialist and technologist approaches. As William Baumol (2002) rightly points out in a provocatively titled paper ("Services as leaders and the leader of services"), not only is research and development a service activity but it also, and most importantly, occupies a privileged position among such activities. However, despite this commonality, and despite R&D"s strategic importance,