Services and systemic innovation: a cross-sectoral analysis

This essay presents a cross-sectoral analysis of innovation in some types of services, namely air traffic control, retail banking, and health care. The provision of such services is organized in network structures whose development relies on competences and activities that cut across traditional sectoral and industrial boundaries. The conceptual background provided by the recent synthesis approach explains these features by elaborating a new concept of system of innovation. In so doing, this approach paves the way for new understanding of innovation in services as the endogenous outcome of knowledge growth within and across technologies, organizations, and institutions.