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To guarantee alignment between ongoing activities and organizational goals, innovation management theory emphasizes management control and explicit innovation strategies as prerequisites for innovation performance. However, the theory on open services innovation emphasizes individual autonomy and incentives to foster open innovations. The aim of this paper is to explore this inconsistency.

An explorative research design involving 25 semi-structured interviews in five large scale-intensive service firms is explored. Scale-intensive service firms are strategically sampled for this study since these firms experience tension between open service innovation characteristics and efforts to standardize.

The authors show how individual autonomy facilitates the internal and external networking required in open innovations. However, individualized incentives do not suffice to motivate, mobilize and direct the collaboration and collective effort needed to ensure successful implementation of open innovation processes. Innovation performance is a collective effort, and the findings suggest that firms' business strategy works as a collective incentive system.

The findings imply that firms should not rely on individualized incentives alone to implement open innovation processes successfully. The implementation of more collectively oriented incentives is also necessary to motivate the collective effort required to succeed with open innovation.

The study extends previous work and shows how innovation practices are collective efforts that also involve the mobilization of external resources. The incentives observed have an effect on individual behaviour, while performance measures, to a larger degree, cater to the collective level. The authors present three propositions for further empirical investigation.

On the one hand, there is a long tradition of approaching management control and innovation as opposites that prompt organisational tensions. On the other hand, recent studies have shown that management control may foster innovation and promote innovative behaviour. At the same time, both these perspectives focus on innovation management, and discussions regarding the role of management control in innovation leadership are conspicuously absent from the literature. In this chapter, we analyse how innovation leaders use management control in two service companies. We demonstrate that, in contrast to innovation managers who employ management control systems primarily for planning, monitoring, and evaluation purposes, innovation leaders use management control for advocacy, engagement, and visibility.

Componentization is a common approach in manufacturing that is suggested to lead to increased innovativeness at the firm level. Componentization has recently been given attention as a relevant approach for service providers. However, due to differences between services and manufactured products, and due to the diversity of the service sector, it is not obvious to what degree the application of componentization is relevant for all service providers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the usefulness of componentization for specialized service providers in the public sector.

The paper applies an interventionist research design, in which the componentization approach is implemented in one case organization.

The paper finds that componentization increases the service orientation of specialized public sector organizations (PSOs) and improves the ability of the top management to manage and control specialized PSOs. Perhaps most importantly, the paper determines that componentization represents a foundation and a baseline for identifying service innovation ideas in specialized PSOs.

The practical experiences reported in the paper may provide guidance to managers of specialized service providers who are seeking for ways to increase the efficiency, flexibility, and innovativeness of their organization.

By empirically testing and evaluating a componentization approach, the paper contributes to the knowledge base of how componentization increases the efficiency, flexibility, and innovativeness of specialized service providers. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the application of an interventionist research approach may be useful when the research aims to develop, adopt, or evaluate new service management methodologies.