CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 R ESEARCH B ACKGROUND AND M OTIVATIONS
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background and Motivations
In recent years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of research concerned with business service innovation. With the increasingly fierce competition between enterprises, effective strategies for competition have become critical.
For decades, the importance of services to the global economy has grown steadily while the importance of goods is being declined. Services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress (Czarnitzki &
Spielkamp, 2003). Because of this exigency the companies are constantly seeking to provide better services, regardless of whether they are in a “pure” service business or in a manufacturing industry that must increasingly rely on its service operations for continued profitability. So the academics define an idea: ”Market-creating service innovation” for a performance enhancement that customers perceive as offerings of new benefits of sufficient appeal that dramatically influence customers behavior, as well as the behavior of competing companies (Berry et al., 2006)).
SMEs (Small- and Medium-sized enterprises) are also facing the same situations of fierce competition. For survival, the SMEs must do some efforts in innovation (Sun
& Wu, 2008). Although SMEs demand for service innovation to continue improvements in their business, but most of them don’t know how to put it into practice. Actually, even if they know how to put service innovation in their business, they may be afraid to do diversification and don’t have enough determination to do it.
Not to mention the fact that some SMEs have no ideas when they confront the fierce competition. They don’t know which they need to do is service innovation.
A growing number of research studies are now available to shed some light on service innovation. Some academic researches mention about innovation motivation,
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organizational factors play a vital role in driving service innovation by commercial banks. Other academics who define an strategy idea : ”Market-creating service innovation” used Google (incorporated in 1998) and eBay Inc. (started in 1996) to be the successful innovation examples, and the other instances include Rent-A-Car Company of revenues exceeding $8 billion (Berry et al., 2006). These academic researches furnish some motivation and fluky case, but this enterprise strategy does not constitute the intention for SMEs to do service innovation. We have tried to convince SMEs which situate in the Mt. Pillow Recreational Agriculture Area in Ilan County that service innovation is a useful way to face the impact of WTO policies, and used Google as an example. However, this instance couldn’t resonate. SMEs consider that the large enterprises like Google there are many human and resources.Therefore, we need to find some ways specifically for encouraging SMBs to do service innovation.
On the other hand, for governments, (e.g., Small and Medium Enterprise Administration of Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan (URL:
http://www.smecluster.org.tw/en/index.php), there are some resources particularly made for the SMEs, such as setting websites to furnish SMEs some information about the innovation, industry analysis and transition counseling. The governments go through surveys and other methods to identify skills / knowledge requirements to enable SMEs to do innovation in both the product way and the service way. However, for the SEMs there are gaps between using these resources given by governments and knowing they need to use these resources. As we mentioned before, we need to let the SMEs know their demands.
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and close their daily life’s instance that them know not only large enterprises can do service innovation. Also, lets some SMEs know why they need to do service innovation, and let them understand only do service innovation can help their precarious business.In this case, we argue that we can use short customized motivation stories to encourage SMEs do service innovation. Functioning as narrative advertisements, story-based communication might be highly applicable to services advertising (Anna S. Mattil, 2000). A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb: Narrare. Narratives are uniquely effective in portraying and conveying experience (Boller, 1988), and story-based appeals might be especially effective for communicating the value of experiential services (Padgett & Allen, 1997). For this reasons, we consider that SMEs can be inspired by the short customized motivation story, and have some idea about how to implement in their small business.
About this short customized motivation story, we create it by a story generating machine. We hope this story generating machine will investigate the information from every SME, and generate unique story for them. Dr. Bernd Schmitt mentioned: “Only link target consumer’s psychological perspective with their life experience and touching memory, brand can be truly in customer’s mind thoroughly and create loyalty (Schmitt, 1999).” When we simulate events, we frequently think about our own actual or potential behaviors, creating behavioral scenarios, similar to stories, in which we are the main character (Escalas, 2004). For this reason, since the motivating stories are created based on the SME’s situation, the high similarities of the plot will create a sense of empathy to SME and makes the story more convincing. Therefore,
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our story can reinforce SME’s courage, prosecuting and innovating their enterprise just like what the protagonist do in a story.