Service Innovation Model within Service Industry

Service innovation has become a key factor to enterprises' competitiveness. Enterprises must constantly engage in innovation activities to maintain their competitive advantage. This study examines the case of Lungyen Life Service Corporation. The funeral industry of Taiwan is in great need of modernization and new concepts from service innovation. Past studies related to the funeral industry focused on industrial modernization management, business strategy of life service corporations, overview of pre-need funeral contract and funeral contract, the role of modern funeral directors, as well as funeral directors and funeral services. However, few studies examined service innovation in the funeral industry. This study adopts the service innovation model proposed by Bettencourt & Brown (2013), which examines service innovation from three aspects, namely new jobs, focal jobs, and consumption chain jobs (Figure 1). The selected case is Lungyen Life Service Corporation. The study collected data from multiple sources, including secondary data, participatory observation, and expert interviews. Each service innovation event of the case is treated as unit of analysis. The researching findings are described as follows. First, service innovations in "new jobs" are neglected. Second, service innovations in "consumption chain jobs" targeted different segments in different stages. Third, "focal jobs" and "consumption chain jobs" are an integrated model developed into a multi-layer nest-shaped "focal jobs" model. Finally service innovation in "support jobs", which improves overall service quality, is a new perspective comparing with Bettencourt & Brown (2013) model. Moreover, the study proposes some managerial implications according to the findings.