Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

ORGANISATIONAL LITERATUR INNOVATION IN HUNGARY
development ICT facilitates changes in
the inherent characteristics of services.
The majority of the former theoretical
contributions emphasized the following three
basic features of services in distinguishing
them from manufacturing activities: (1)
service is intangible and, therefore, cannot be
accumulated; (2) production and consumption
are simultaneous activities; and (3) services
are produced jointly with the customer (as the
customer represents a basic input for services)
(Kuusisto & Meyer 2003, Chesbrough &
Spohrer 2006). The changing role of ICT
has resulted in a standardisation of services.
Some services are becoming more similar to
manufacturing products: they are standardised,
storable and deliverable (Sundbo 2002). These
changes 1 , which are labelled “productising of
services”, are visible in the increasing weight of
services in the international trade (Sako 2005).
A similar tendency has also taken place in the
manufacturing sector. The basic idea here is to
utilise economy of scale of mass production
and, simultaneously, the greater value added
by the costumer-specialisation of products. As
a consequence, there is a growing interest in
modularisation of products, on the one hand,
and a development of services related to the
products or a shift of activities in direction of
services, on the other (e.g. IBM or Siemens).
This process is often called “servicising
products”. (Sundbo 1999, Kuusisto & Meyer
2003, Sako 2005).
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The changes presented briefly
above, e.g. the standardisation
and “productising” of services, the
modularisation and “servicising” of products
and the blurring boundaries between service
and manufacturing sector, caused radical
changes in the economic weight of services.
In this relation it is important to stress the
increasing role of knowledge-intensive services
in innovation, knowledge development and
transfer that are of particular importance
in opening a new development path for an
economy.
1.1 Distinguishing characteristic of the
service sector: extreme heterogeneity
The aggregated data presented in Table 1
do not provide information on the internal
composition of the service sector nor on its
changes, although it is composed of very
heterogeneous activities representing diverse
productivity, employment, working conditions
and patterns of knowledge use. There have been
several attempts to classify the different service
activities focused characteristics of the sector
such as role of technology, the intangibility of
outputs and modes of innovation (Pavitt 1984,
Porter 1990, Evangelista 2000, Miozzo-Soete
2001, Hollenstein 2003). Salter and Tether
(2006) differentiate three basic types of services
firms in their classification based on economic
function: traditional services, system firms and
knowledge-intensive business services.
Traditional service firms are small and serve
local needs. These firms suffer from poor
technology base, weak managerial and labour
force skills, and a lack of abilities to provide
high value-added services. Traditional service
firms often have no full-time employees and
rely on self-employment or part-time staff.
They are often associated with a “low-skill
equilibrium” in their manpower use.
System firms, on the other hand, are large and