Services are at the center of the economic activity and service innovation has gained increased attention. Given the complexity involved on new service development (NSD), it can be carried out by the collaboration of a network of companies. It becomes increasingly relevant to promote global service research agendas that concomitantly draw on the interdisciplinary and cross-functional perspective of academics and executives. This research aimed to understand the complex NSD process and how this process happens in the Collaborative context, contributing to understand how CNs can potentiate NSD. The research started with an exploratory study involving four service projects with the objective of charactering the main stages of the process and to analyze when CNs were formed. After this, a qualitative study was undertaken to get an in-depth understanding of CNs role in the NSD performance. This study identified desirable performance factors of NSD in the CNs context in large projects, analyzing how the factors evolve and how they influence the stages along the NSD process, with focus on importance of information and communication management to the process success. The study showed that some performance factors cross-cut all of NSD process, however, the relevance of these factors change along these stages.
Innovation; New Service Development; Collaborative networks; Performance factors; Information management; Communication management
