Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation by a product-dominant company must begin with the recognition that services are solutions to customer needs. As such, the primary goal of a product-dominant company seeking service innovation should not be to innovate service. Rather, it should be to help customers get a specific job done better or to help them get more jobs done. To this end, we offer three approaches for companies seeking new service innovation based on how customers define value.

The secret to true service innovation lies in shifting focus away from the service solution back to the customer. Rather than asking, "How are we doing?" managers must ask, "How is the customer doing?" For far too many businesses, service innovation means making incremental improvements to existing services. While a focus on improving current services certainly has its place, we indicate that this has constrained firms' innovation capabilities by limiting new ideas. In order to truly innovate, firms must expand their focus beyond existing services and service capabilities to address the fundamental needs of their customers, including the jobs and outcomes those customers are trying to achieve. By further focusing service innovation on developing shared solutions with customers, firms are better able to create breakthrough service offerings and processes. This will result in value co-creation that is both meaningful to customers and uniquely differentiated from competitive offerings. To this end, we present a four-step process for firms to guide job-centric service innovation.

Service innovations reportedly involve innovating intangible products, but this article argues for a more radical service-logic perspective that challenges the traditional, attribute-based view of innovation. Rather than innovating products and services, the focus here shifts toward innovating customers' value co-creation roles. This article presents a case-based managerial framework that reveals how service-logic innovations change the customer's role as a buyer, payer, or user and shows how firms can innovate through smart offerings, different value integration approaches, and reconfigured value constellations.