Customers’ New Technology Adoption Driving a Supplier’s Service Innovations

Customers’ known and latent needs are important drivers of service innovations in technology-based firms. Business customers may have various needs during new technology adoption, but research has not explicitly linked customers’ technology adoption with suppliers’ service innovations before. This study seeks an increased understanding on the creation of service innovations based on customer firms’ new technology adoption. We employed a qualitative multi-method multiple-case study among three customer firms of a technology supplier, with the focus on how the customers adopted a new automation technology and how it offered possibilities for the supplier to identify service op
portunities. The results show that the contexts of technology use appear important, making the technology adoption processes different across the customer companies. A broad range of service opportunities were identified, indicating attractive possibilities for technology suppliers to adapt their service offerings according to customers’ processes and phase of technology
adoption. Where much of the previous technology adoption research has focused on information technology and single users, the results of this study contribute by revealing the central role of process readiness and multi-user complexity in the company-level use of a new technology, and by linking service innovation opportunities to the phase of technology adoption.