Understanding Practice-Based Innovation in Services

This incisive book moves beyond treating service innovation as a discrete event by analysing it through a practice-based lens. It provides a robust theoretical framework for understanding both service delivery and innovation as habit-based phenomena, introducing the dual concepts of Services-as-Practices and Innovation-as-Practice.Chapters examine the underlying reasons for changes in services, such as worker-led adjustments, user contributions, formal development projects and new technologies including AI. Contributors explore innovation as a continuous, collective process that creates ongoing patterns of behaviour shaped by employees, users and wider society. The book advocates treating the topic as a social ontology, while emphasizing the importance of legitimacy, recognition and collective learning.This is an essential resource for students and scholars of economics, political science and sociology looking to develop new approaches to service innovation. Policymakers, practitioners and managers seeking a better understanding of public value creation will also benefit from its deep insights into public sector innovation.