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Innovation is an old word, of Greek origin, that came into the Latin vocabulary in the early Middle Age and into our everyday vocabulary with the Reformation. However, it is only during the second half of the twentieth century that innovation became a fashionable concept and turned into a buzzword. It gave rise to a plethora of terms like technological innovation, organizational innovation, industrial innovation and, more recently, social innovation, open innovation, sustainable innovation, responsible innovation. We may call these terms X-innovation.In this way, X-innovation is the latest step to give sense to a century-old process of enlargement of the concept of innovation. Over the last five centuries, innovation enlarged its meaning from the religious to the political to the social to the economical. X-innovation is the more recent such enlargement. It Is the continuation, under new terms, of the contestation of technological innovation as the dominant discourse of the twentieth century.How can we make sense of this semantic extension? Why do these terms come into being? What drives people to coin new terms? What effects do the terms have on thought, on culture and scholarship and on policy and politics? Which forms of contestation and appropriation ensue around certain X-innovations? How do they shape, and are shaped by, broader social trends? How to they relate to questions of power and inclusion?

The world is being shaped by service. All the world's most advanced economies are dominated by service, with many countries having more than 70 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) generated by it. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employees. The questions posed in this book are: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value creating activity that customers perform in their own context: The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. Based on this view, we develop a model of service innovation. Service innovation is a multifaceted concept dependent on the purpose of the innovation. These purposes could be to: differentiate, finance, help, experience, and streamline the process or offering. In turn, these result in: brand innovation, business model innovation, social innovation, experience innovation, process innovation, and behavioral innovation, respectively. In this book, we develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective, how should an organization view its customers in order to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that is goods-centric to become service or solution provider. Despite the heightened focus on service in many business sectors, most models and theories of innovation are based on a goods perspective, assuming that the norm is a physical good. We believe that the norm is actually experiential and service based. This book addresses this mismatch of theory and practice for the benefit of those who are seeking to understand, teach, and practice service innovation.

Innovation maybe the ultimate driving force of a nation's economic growth and prosperity. According to Porter's theory of national competitive advantage, a nation's economic development typically goes through the following several stages: resource driven, investment driven and innovation driven (Porter, 1998). Since China embarked on the road of economic reform and opening up to the world in late 1970s, several decades of economic development have achieved astonishing accomplishments, known as the China Miracle. The major engine for economic growth has been the huge investment infused into the

Purpose Previous work on employee-driven innovation (EDI) has demonstrated the benefits of employees' proactive behavior in achieving success with innovations. The purpose of this paper is to employ the concept of personal initiative to investigate the underestimated role of employees' agency in complex processes of innovation, showing the impact of personal initiative on employees' innovation success. Design/methodology/approach Based on two embedded cases of environmental bottom-up innovation at a large manufacturing company, this study examines employees' behavior in generating, championing and realizing such initiatives. Findings This paper provides insights into how employees succeeded, through taking initiative in generating, championing and realizing environmental initiatives despite facing high complexity, and resource constraints. Without being prompted from the top down, employees started these initiatives themselves and showed phase-specific behavior in overcoming the various challenges. Thus, self-starting behavior was found dominant in generating ideas, whereas proactive and persistent forms of behavior were found to be prevalent in championing and rolling out the initiatives. Originality/value Current understandings of EDI highlight the importance of developing employees' potential capabilities and organizational-level guidance. Using an active performance perspective, this study emphasizes the importance of employees' agency in ensuring EDI success, even when conditions are not conducive to their doing so.