Service Innovation
Written by SimonC
Jonathan Reynolds from SAID Oxford held a very interesting presentation at BI last week. His theme was Service-Innovation and he took a broad look at the field. He showed that Norway is not in the top league of service innovations, but is not trailing by much either and gave some interesting updates on facts:
1. Services account for almost 54% of total value added in EU-25 economies compared to 18.3% in Manufacturing (Eurostat info).
2. Growth in services has outpaced overall economic growth in the EU-25 areas.
He presented an intersting continuum of services along a scale ranging from Tangible-dominant services to Intangible-dominant, explaining why some services are closer to products and others are purely intangible. He also showed that service thinking is invading traditional product areas such as mining, construction, agriculture and mining.
However there were two very interesting things that he mentioned:
1.The importance of customers as co-creators of value
2.The importance of the customer experience
In fact, most of the success stories that he talked about were innovations in customer experience. This was very interesting, since more and more I seem to see examples that show that innovations in the customer experience give great payoffs for small costs. An underlying message here is: talk to your customers, understand their needs and reflect this by introducing quick, simple and incremental changes in the customer experience to reflect this.