Exploration of uncertainty in technological context through the holographic approach to service innovation; a synthesis review

Abstract

Service innovation has been a serious debate in the literature on service management, especially when it is compared with new service development (NSD). While service innovation is defined based upon certain approaches, there is no specific definition that differentiates service innovation from NSD, especially in a certain technological context such as social assistive robots. Therefore, bringing a new approach that encompasses all features of service innovation is a topic of interest. This paper aims to introduce the holographic approach to service innovation in the condition of uncertainty by a critical narrative synthesis methodology on high quality and top-cited publications in the last three decades. The qualitative findings show that service innovation can be established in a social assistive robot as a certain technological context, based on the holographic approach in which each single component of the innovation process enfolds service innovation as a smaller whole.