Innovation research is financed by the industries in question- creates analytic blindspots

(Lars Witell, Hannah Snyder, and Per Carlborg Against Service Innovation: Why Service Innovation Is Not Sustainable In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

Research on service innovation focuses almost solely on the positive side of service innovation, ignoring the potential negative side effects. The “pro-change” bias in service innovation research has grown more intense over time (Witell et al. 2015) and we argue that researchers and managers need to take a more critical view of service innovation and its relation to sustainability. First, changing perspective using the line of conflict can reveal that service innovations seen as having positive effects on sustainability, in reality, have negative effects. This means that service innovation research misses the mark in their studies on the sharing econ omy and green services. Second, research on service innovation solely focuses on “successful” service innovation but neglects the services that never become service innovations. What if these failed services used the exact same methods and processes and had similar effects on sustainabil ity, so what has been established as success factors in reality might have no influence on success? Research with a pro-change bias has a higher probability of being published, and in addition, it might be easier to obtain funding for such research projects. Funding based on the logics of a market makes it difficult for research integrity to prevail over time (Vie 2021). As much research funding comes from external sources under competition, they are typically more or less restricted in their freedom of use, that is, in which type of research questions they can address. Financiers with interests and research agendas in a specific direction or topic often challenge the research integrity of the individual researcher. The power of the finan cier places the researcher in a situation where integrity needs to be bal anced with the ability to stay financially viable to conduct research. Hence, researchers need to balance both professional academic ethics, norms, and a high degree of critical thinking with the influence of finan ciers and the logic of the market (Vie 2021). By focusing too much on individual firms’ success in research, the negative effect on sustainability increases as the larger service ecosystem of actors is disregarded (e.g., social and environmental sustainability). To prevent the effects of weak ened research integrity, research funders, and especially research in the form of commissioned research (where external actors define topic and research problems), need to better understand the long-term value of independent research.