Along with the world enters the post-industrial age, the professional division of labor is increasingly refined, enterprises bring forward more and more extensive and specific demands to external service providers. In particular from the second half of the 20th century, the softening of the economy has been accelerated, the global economy has entered the era of service economy, and the service industry has become the rapidly growing sector and the pivot area to settle the problem of employment.

On one hand, the service economy has become a key element of competition and transformation of all sectors, on the other hand, social, economic & technological developments have made increasingly strong demand to service innovation, promote rapid growth of service economy. It can be said that the driving force of service economy is services innovation.

So, what is the service innovation?
From the economic point of view, service innovation is an economic activity for increasing added value of tangible or intangible "products" by means of immaterial manufacture. This activity has become even more prominent in the IT industry. The rapid development of information technology makes higher homogenization in the product technologies and functions, and there are little space of competition by improving product quality and reduce the cost of production, as a result, service becomes an important weapon of market competition. In the past IT service in a narrow sense is the after-sales service, which is generally free of charge. But IT service in a broad sense emphasis on service innovation of IT industry, including to carry out added value services through innovation on IT consulting, application software, system integration, application training, outsourcing services and other professional services. In fact, it is the processes in which the innovative integration between IT and soft technology will be implemented. So there are profound changes have been taken place in the concept of IT service, IT service in a broad sense has become the development trend throughout the IT industry. For example, Software services, its innovative approaches including three aspects………….

From a technological point of view, the service innovation is the innovative activities of soft technology which aim to meet human demands. Soft-tech innovation activities can be divided into three areas: those fields related to material product sectors such as management, organizing, design and etc.; those areas related to cultural industry & social industry which aim to enriching spiritual life and driving social end ecology progress; and soft technology innovation related to traditional service industry & intellectual service industry in a narrow sense.

From the social perspective, the service innovation is the activities to create & exploit human values, enhance & improve the quality of life and ameliorate the social and ecological environment. Hence, through to meet the material requisites, spiritual & psychological needs and provide the ability of problem solution, service innovation ensures people's spiritual & psychological health, while they can find satisfaction and achievement. Traditional technology has been excluded "human Psyche". But along with the advancement of material civilization, people not only pays more attention to the feeling of living (vision, hearing, taste, smell, sense, intuition), but also expects that their feeling, sentiment, emotions, ethics and human dignity can be respected. It requires that the future technology cannot simply focus on "efficiency first" & "benefit first", and we should study and develop those technologies which might sacrifice a little efficiency but make our living and working environment more effortless, more comfortable & convenient, and respect for human sentiment, emotion and moral. Namely, it’s the technology attaching importance to human "Heart". In reverse, human awareness about their value and capacity is far from sufficient. These factors are the "softening" drive of many hard technologies and the drive of "servicelization" of manufacturing, the important content of raising the added value of soft technology, hence it is an important task of service innovation. It is much more obvious in the social service & cultural service sector.

From the point of view of methodology, service innovation is the activities of exploiting all of new means & new approaches in favor of creating the added value. These approaches can be divided into three areas that we mentioned at the service innovation from technological perspective. It is understandable that methodology belong to the technology field. Namely, service innovation is the activities of inventing, creating or developing and applying the new service methods, service approaches, service targets & service market.

In short, 1) the essence of service innovation is soft technology innovation, that is to say, various soft technologies as the core technology is forming multifarious service industry; 2) the efficiency of service innovation, namely the efficiency of creating added value, depends on the soft technology innovation and whether the integration of soft & hard technology is successful or not. In reverse, in the process of service innovation, all necessary material substance and artificial products which need by service acceptors are tools of soft technology innovation.
For a long time, because people do not think services need also special technologies, they have not studied & developed skills, means, processes and rules of services as special technologies. As is well known, there are a lot of economic vocabularies for interpreting the primary and secondary industry, moreover, economists, scientist and technological experts attached particular importance to the creative development of technology in these industries. But for the service industry, there is few R & D institutions devoted to doing research systematically in the world, service innovation issues have not been taken due attention………….

Source: Zhouying JIN, Lin REN,《Service Innovation and Social Resource》