Service Innovation
According to a BusinessWeek article titled “Service Innovation: The Next Big Thing” the attention of managers and academics around the world are increasingly turning to this type of innovation. The latest demonstration was the creation of the Service Research & Innovation Initiative, which is backed by some tech giants like IBM and Oracle.
Jim Spohrer, director of service research at IBM, commented: “The average person knows the story of Thomas Edison, the inventor and innovator who came up with the lightbulb. People don’t tend to think of the related service innovations—getting lightbulbs into houses and schools, setting prices for the electricity services to keep them lit. That’s all service innovation.”
Do you agree that service innovation is gaining attention lately?
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You’ve opened up an irksome issue for me. My old alma mater has started to promote itself as a leader in teaching “service design.”
Interesting how a school can position itself as an “expert” in a field that it didn’t even know existed only 6 years ago. Without sweeping changes in personnel I can’t imagine how a faculty can acquire expertise in a new domain ensconced in the comfortably immutable walls of their ivory tower. The answer is it can if it really isn’t a new domain after all, but an old familiar one with in new clothes.
Well, now that I got that off my chest…
It doesn’t really matter whether you’re talking about service, software or hardware innovation if you’re focused is on the customer or user experience. Indeed the market research, user research and design methods will all be the same regardless of the market offering’s manifestation.
Even prudent old-fashioned approaches to developing new physical products have always taken into account supporting services as part of the whole product. In many cases the service is the biggest value (IBM would sell you its new servers but are actually selling consulting, and McDonald’s will sell you a burger but it’s the fast, standardized service that adds the real value).
So the whole “service innovation” and “service design” that seems to be getting some modest press lately strikes me as a old non-story that is little more than hype fodder.
What’s next, a new trend in Data over IP innovation?