Sustainable innovation and service quality: an integrated overview

Abstract

Sustainability is today a main concern of society. One way of addressing the problem and the need for sustainability is through innovation in products and services that are geared towards the satisfaction of specific needs of organizations, institutions or costumers related to a demand for products, services or product-services that are friendlier to the environment. Sustainable innovation is thus seen as a way of meeting the expectations of consumers and organizations regarding the delivery of green products or services. Stated in this way, there are two concepts that emerge as fundamental to the study of sustainability: the concept of sustainable innovation and the concept of service quality. The research questions that motivate this research are: what is the relationship between sustainable innovation and service quality? Are the expectations of consumers or organizations being met by the supply of green products and services? What are the implications in terms of changes that organizations or consumers must make? Having in mind these questions, the aim of this document is to explore the relationship between sustainable innovation and service quality in the scientific literature, identifying the factors and interactions that are suggested by it. The research methodology used to achieve that objective was based on a literature review, made with a qualitative approach. A four-point scale was developed to assess, in each article, the level of relation between the two concepts. The scale ranges from high to null relation between the two concepts. Most of the articles propose a positive relation between the two concepts, whereby 58% of the articles reviewed have the category of "high relation", and 31% were categorized as having a "medium relation". The implications for organizations may be the incorporation within their organizational culture of a strategy of integration of sustainable innovation and service quality through a mechanism called social and environmental responsibility.