Knowledge Intensive Services' Suppliers and Clients

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3 Perspectives from (Services)
Innovation Studies
3.1 Innovation surveys
We have cited some CIS2 results as to the nature of KIBS themselves above – soon
internationally comparative CIS3 studies will be forthcoming. Other survey
instruments have been able to examine certain features of KIBS in more depth.
Many accounts of the specificities of services stress the importance of close
interaction with clients. A German survey of service innovation allows one facet of
this to be studied: it asked firms how far their activities were standardised, as
opposed to being customised to the requirements of specific clients. Hipp et al’s
(2000) data analysis suggested that technology-related KIBS were especially likely
to produce specialised service outputs: 27 % of Technical Services, and 18 % of
Software firms, reported more than a third of their output being specialised.
(Comparable figures were 4 % for Banking and Insurance [but 18 % for Other
Financial Services], 5 % for Trade and 2 % for Transport and Communication,
10 % for Other Business Services and 4 % for a Residual category.) Overall,
smaller firms were also more likely to be more specialised. Firms that provided
partially-customised or specialised services, too were more likely to report
undertaking innovations than were Wholly Standardised service providers
(controlling for features such as size). And while one third of the Wholly
Standardised innovators claimed that their innovation(s) had an important impact
on their users’ performance and/or productivity, over 60 % of the Specialised and
Intermediate firms thought this to be the case.
The implication is that the latter firms are adapting more of their outputs to suit
specific clients; that they have better understanding of client features and
requirements; and that they build this understanding into their services to benefit
the clients. It looks like firms who adapt more of their outputs to suit specific
clients’ needs, have, and are able to act effectively on the basis of, superior
understanding of these needs. Software firms were by far the most likely to claim
important effects for their innovations on their users’ performance and/or
productivity, but, surprisingly, Technical Services had only an average propensity
to make this claim.
Firms that introduced more than one type of innovation were most likely to report
important effects on their own and their clients’ performance. This was particularly