Specialist, Generalist, or Both? How Chief Marketing Officers’ Career Experiences Shape the Pace of Service Innovation

The role of chief marketing officers (CMOs) for service innovation has mostly been overlooked in empirical research. Particularly unclear is how CMOs’ personal career experiences shape their firms’ pace of service innovation. We address this issue by examining whether and when specialist CMOs (with a limited variety of career experiences) and generalist CMOs (with a wide variety of career experiences) influence service innovation outcomes, arguing that a “sweet spot” of career variety—a mix of specialist and generalist experiences—is most beneficial. Drawing on service innovations that 209 U.S. firms introduced between 2009 and 2020, we find support for the sweet-spot proposition: Adding generalist experiences to specialized insights increases the pace of service innovations, but only up to an inflection point. Introducing CMOs’ (1) strategic, (2) financial, and (3) operational discretion as important contingencies, we show that service innovation in stable industries, in which CMOs’ strategic discretion is reduced, benefits from specialists. Contrary to our expectation, career experience effects are attenuated in situations of high financial leeway, possibly because money helps overcome any disadvantages in CMOs’ ability to innovate. Finally, mixed-career CMOs shine especially bright with high operational discretion, that is, when organizational processes favor service innovation over selling existing products.