Adoption of Service Innovations in a Business-to-Business Context: An Interdisciplinary Research Project within the Software Industry

虽然有大量关于在消费者层面采用创新的研究，但这些决策在企业对企业（B2B）背景下的研究不足。这一点在服务创新中尤为明显，因为这种创新为生产商品和提供服务的企业提供了巨大的增长机会。由于服务创新在许多行业中是未来增长的驱动力，因此了解影响客户购买决策的因素对于服务创新提供商的成功至关重要。B2B采购决策受到各种不同因素的影响，这些因素非常复杂（例如，这些决策通常是由几个人在一个采购中心做出的，选择过程通常需要几个月）。拟议的研究项目通过开发一个基于软件行业的B2B采用服务创新的集成模型来应对这一挑战。软件行业的特点是各种不同的B2B服务，销售中相对较高的服务份额，以及大量的创新努力。利用概念模型，该项目研究了服务创新的提供者如何系统地提高B2B采用率，从而能够实现其产品在市场上的及时扩散。在这种情况下，在B2B背景下的关键成功因素的关系特性是本研究项目的重点。此外，研究模型中还考虑了服务创新的特点以及购买中心的特点。

While there is a large body of research regarding the adoption of innovations at a consumer level, these decisions are under researched in a business-to-business (B2B) context. This particularly applies for service innovations, which is surprising since this type of innovation offers substantial growth opportunities for companies producing goods as well as services.Because of their key role as drivers for future growth in many industries, the understanding of factors influencing the buying decisions of customers is critical to the success of providers of service innovations. B2B purchase decisions are influenced by a variety of different factors, which are extremely complex (for example, these decisions are often made by several people in a buying-center and the selection process takes often several months).The proposed research project addresses this challenge by developing an integrated model for B2B adoption of service innovations, based on the example of the software industry. The software industry is characterized by a high variety of different B2B services, a relatively high share of services in sales, and a large number of innovation endeavors. Drawing on the conceptual model, the project investigates how providers of service innovations can systematically increase B2B adoption rates and, thus, are able to achieve the timely diffusion of their products in the market. In this vein, relationship characteristics as critical success factors in a B2B context are in the focus of this research project. In addition, characteristics of the service innovations as well as characteristics of the buying-center are considered in the research model.