Abstract
The perspective consisting of medical ethics and customer value concerns five constructs: ethical value, functional value, hedonic value, relationship value and contextual value. This study adopts a single-industry case-oriented qualitative research method. A total of 60 hospitals were selected. Through secondary data collection and in-depth interviews, this study totally collected 536 innovation events. The data analysis is based on the methods of pattern-matching, explanation-building, timeseries and program logic model. The findings are: 1. The core value creation by service innovations is “functional value”, supplemented by “contextual value” and “relationship value”. 2. The hospitals with higher hierarchy pay more attention to“functional value”, while the hospitals with lower hierarchy pay more attention to “relationship value”. 3. The rate of innovation events creating “functional value” shows a declined trend, while that creating “relationship value” shows an increasing trend; the rate of innovation events creating “contextual value” shows an U-type curve, while that creating “ethical value” or “hedonic value” shows an inversed U-type. 4. The rate of innovation events provided by the hospitals with higher hierarchy shows a declined trend, while that provided by the hospitals with slower hierarchy shows an increasing trend