Potentials and Barriers of Technology Deployment in Services: Productivity Increase and Innovation

In an economy with a fast growing demand for services, productivity and innovation become crucial for the survival of service companies. In order to keep up with the change, these companies have to adopt new technologies in the service deployment. This is the only possible way to higher productivity as well as innovation and to serve an increasing amount of customers - even worldwide. Especially when it comes to the management of technologies and innovations, there seem to be major differences between leading companies and their followers. However, due to budget restrictions, investments in new technologies have to be well considered and guarantee a swift return of investment and increase in productivity. This can only be achieved by choosing the right technology to reach the potentials. In order to determine and increase the productivity of service deployment, the impact of different technologies on services has to be thoroughly studied. In this paper, empirical results from different industries are presented. A cluster analysis is used to divide the participating companies into two groups. They are either identified as champions (innovative companies) or as followers (less innovative companies) in order to show their differences. The results provide information about the significance of technology deployment in services and the potentials and barriers which go along with it.