Frontline Employee Networks for Service Innovation

Abstract

Organizational Frontlines research has recognised the customer-facing interactions and interfaces as crucial for service innovation. Yet, organisations still find it difficult to innovate from the frontlines. This dissertation examines the role of frontline employee networks in relation to service innovation. Intra-organizational networks with customer-facing and internal-facing employees can generate new service idea networks and spontaneous decision-making networks for alignment of tasks and resources. These emergent service employee networks could form a sustainable and powerful innovation foundation. Thus, this dissertation conceptualises a taxonomy of network domains - in which frontlin..