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This chapter presents the critical incident technique (CIT) and argues that CIT, when combined with other more ‘reflexive’ approaches, can provide an analysis of everyday experiences of services and make these experiences useful for innovation. The chapter seeks to place the critical incident technique in three different research traditions, with examples from services and innovation: positivist–functional, phenomenological–interpretivist and process-oriented reflexive. The value of the critical incident technique as a special interview and research technique for service innovation research is discussed.

This chapter discusses the potential of interpretivist approaches for social network analysis (SNA) to analyse service innovation processes. The benefits of interpretivist SNA approaches are discussed and it is argued that in service innovation studies they contribute an important complementary approach to more typical positivist, mathematical and computational approaches. The chapter illustrates how interpretivist-oriented SNA can identify, emphasize and explain the dynamic development of innovation networks and how this development is related to service innovation. It can identify and highlight the complex combinations of factors, including a variety of contextual factors that are important for the character and development of social networks as well as related service innovation processes.

The laddering method is a qualitative interview technique applied in a situation with one interviewer and one informant with the aim of creating an understanding of the value that business-to-consumer (B2C) customers extract from product attributes. Thus, this methodology aims to depict a mental map of what is actually going on in the consumer’s mind when the consumer is buying and consuming specific goods. It is argued, in this chapter, that this understanding is indeed both interesting and relevant in service innovation. More specifically, realizations of consumers’ values will help to guide marketers to understand what to innovate, how to innovate, how to plan and efficiently communicate changes, how to sell the innovations in the market place and how to implement organizational changes that innovations might cause. Furthermore, the laddering methodology has been applied across many fields with good success and the premises for using the method and for analyzing obtained data, is rather well described. The latter (i.e. premises and data analysis) is often raised as central and critical points of qualitative research methodology when arguing for problems with validity and reliability of findings.