Barriers to innovation management in service companies

This paper reports the result of a survey of service companies in the UK carried out to investigate how innovation is understood in service companies and to identify the potential barriers to innovation management in these companies. The research identifies a number of factors that could potentially inhibit innovation performance in service companies. The paper also investigates the effects of these factors on innovation performance and some interesting results are obtained. For instance, the difficulty in getting top management support as a barrier to innovation management is found to have a significant negative relationship with perceived innovation performance. In other words companies that did not perceive this factor as problematic to innovation management reported a superior innovation performance compared with companies that found this factor to be very problematic.