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“The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on service innovation during the past two decades and provide an analysis of sources of publication, citations and authorship using bibliometric analysis techniques (VOSviewer).” This paper aims to assesses the important trends, enhance the academic debate, identify research gaps and propose future directions and a research agenda.

This paper examines 176 articles in English language published from 2002 to 2022 from the Scopus database by adopting the bibliometric technique using VOSviewer software. This paper analyzes the different levels and boundaries of service innovation using bibliometric analysis of “service innovation research” using VOSviewer software. The methodology analyzes the number of citations, co-citations, keywords, authors, journals and countries.

The review of the past 20 years indicates a substantial growth in the number of good research publications on service innovation. The UK, the USA, Sweden and Australia dominate this research area with the most articles published to date under the subject area of “Business management.” The review highlighted that most of the studies on service innovation focused on products, companies and processes in the services industry. The most critical factors behind service innovation failure are improper management and lack of knowledge. The citation analysis revealed various research implications and directions for the future.

This study focuses only on service innovation and excludes research on performance management and control. Thus, future studies may explore this area of research in future studies. Only research articles were analyzed; conference papers, reports, manuals and white papers from practice were excluded. Research implications indicate that future studies on service innovation would be essential for organizational excellence, not process excellence.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and essential trends of research on service innovation. This study identifies the research gaps and provides a clear research agenda for understanding the various elements of service innovation.