Customer-Oriented Innovation and Firm Performance

The service-dominant logic of marketing suggests that customer-oriented innovation should be an essential focus for any firm; however, there is limited literature on the relative impact of customer-oriented innovation on firm performance in comparison with other dimensions of innovation. We integrate the service-dominant logic of marketing with the resource-based view of strategy to examine the relative importance of customer-oriented innovation on firm performance. By analyzing data from 765 managers from 52 business units of 19 large U.S. corporations, we find that customer-oriented innovation and offering-oriented innovation are both significantly associated with firm performance, while operations-oriented innovation is not. We discuss the implications of our findings for the service-dominant logic of marketing, resource-based view of strategy and measurement of innovation.