Thursday, April 12, 2007
The MA Design – Service Innovation
The MA Design – Service Innovation ONLINE is aimed at practising professionals operating in the service sector who wish to develop a pro-active, innovative approach to reflective practice. The need for design solutions to consider the physical product as part of a whole system is an increasingly common approach attracting critical attention. This pathway is intended to develop the process and focus of developers, educators and consultants in service design and is delivered by Distance Learning. Candidates are required to be in service design employment during the course.
Creating New Markets Through Service Innovation
Look at this article on MIT Sloan Review.Service businesses now make up about 70% of the aggregate production and employment in the OECD nations, yet true innovation is rare in the service sector. Many companies incrementally improve their offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that launch new markets or reshape existing ones.The premise of this article is that by thinking about a service in terms of its core benefits and the separability of its use from its production, managers can more easily see how to outinnovate their competitors. Before they can do so, though, they must understand the different types of market-creating service innovations as well as the factors that enable them.The authors introduce and describe a two-by-two matrix whose taxonomy helps managers think strategically about service innovations that can create new markets. The dimensions of the matrix refer to the type of benefit offered and the degree of service separability. The article references best-practices examples including Enterprise Rent-A-Car, FedEx, eBay, Starbucks, Cirque du Soleil, Google, Southwest Airlines, Walgreens, Netflix and Barnes & Noble to illuminate each of the four cells of the matrix and explain the value to managers of understanding the dynamics of the cell that is most applicable to their service innovation efforts.
Service Research & Innovation Initiative
IBM, Oracle, and other tech companies have formed a new nonprofit consortium dedicated to the advancement of service innovation. IBM realized that service innovation isn't a one-company thing," says Thomas Pridham, senior vice-president, Advanced Programs of the Service & Support Professionals Assn., and executive director of the SRI Initiative. In other words, IBM realized that, to fully understand how the field of service innovation was evolving, it needed to be part of the broader community. The SRI Initiative, Spohrer points out, has always been conceived as a separate entity from IBM, despite being the brainchild of IBM executives. And the SRI Initiative's future online social-networking and public archive features could distinguish the SRI initiative from earlier industry groups, such as the San Carlos (Calif.)-based Consortium for Service Innovation, founded more than a decade ago. That nonprofit organization's list of tech benefactors and advisers has some crossover with that of the SRI Initiative (Microsoft and Cisco, e.g.). It offers white papers, workshops, and conferences for members to learn how to improve their customer-service programs, as well as a members-only wiki to share ideas. The SRI Initiative's plans to formally involve educational institutions and government funders to collaborate with corporations—perhaps the next step in gaining widespread acknowledgement for both the idea and practice of "service innovation"—should further distinguish the two organizations. You can read more about this here. You can go to the SRI website here.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Service Prototyping
I promise to explain this service prototype I made for a customer in the healthcare industry next week.
More about Service Envy
The founders of Live/Work believe that the ability to create service envy should be the ultimate goal for the service designer: “How do you design a service that people can use, not only to obtain the functional benefit of the service, but to use the expressive value? How can I express something about my character through the services that I subscribe to? For example, being able to say in the pub, I fly Virgin!, means something.” YOU ARE WHAT YOU USE, NOT WHAT YOU OWN (from Live-Work Web Site).
R&D Comes to Services
This is an article I find interesting: R&D Comes to Services: Bank of America’s Pathbreaking Experiments (Harvard Business School, by Stefan Thomke, April 2003). Look at this excerpt: “At the heart of business today lies a dilemma: Our economy is increasingly dependent on services, yet our innovation processes remain oriented toward products. We have well tested, scientific methods for developing and refining manufacturing goods – methods that date back to the industrial laboratories of Thomas Edison – but many of them don’t seem applicable to the world of services. Companies looking for breakthrough in service development tend to fall back on informal and largely haphazard efforts, from brainstorming, to trial and error, to innovation teams. Such programs can produce occasional successes, but they offer little opportunity for the kind of systematic learning required to strengthen the consistency and productivity of service development, and innovation in general, over time. The challenge in applying the discipline of formal R&D processes to services are readily apparent. Because service is intangible, often existing only in the moment of its delivery to a customer, it is difficult to isolate in a traditional laboratory. As a result, experiments with new services are most useful when they are conducted live, with real customers engaged in real transactions.” There is also a great case study about Bank of America from Harvard Business School (Case No. 9-603-022).
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Inspiration for Innovation
New to the Service Innovation field? Don't miss this video of Jeneanne Rae at the BIF INNOVATION STORY STUDIO (need Quicktime installed on your computer). BIF Research Advisory Council member Jeneanne Rae is a nationally-recognized thought leader for Innovation Management and Design Strategy. She was recently recognized by Business Week magazine, December 19, 2005, "Best Leaders of the Year" - "Jeneanne Rae is the innovation champion's champion." Her monthly contributions to Business Week's online Innovation channel are among the most popular "Insight" columns. For more than a dozen years, Jeneanne's career in innovation and design was focused on product-based companies. However, current trends suggest that in the future discrete products will merely enable what customers readily pay premium prices for today, that is: services and experiences. Jeannee is co-founder of Peer Insight, a research and consulting firm focused on service innovation and customer experience design. (Mario Morales)Ethnography for Service Innovation
Ethnography is a tool for better service design. Great design always connects with people. Service Designers inspire, provoke, validate, entertain and provide utility for people. To truly connect, service designers need to have compassion and empathy for their audiences. Service Designers need to understand the relationship between what they produce and the meaning their service has for others.
Look at this great Ethnography Document I found from a company called Cheskin.
(Mario Morales)
Inspiration for Service Innovation
I am reading a book called Designing Interactions and I was really surprised that it had two chapters on Service Innovation. One of the chapters talks about a company called LiveWork a service innovation and design company based in London, founded by Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason in 2001. They have defined a point of view about what service design could and should be. You should really take a look at what these guys are doing. It's incredible. I will copy their Service Design Glossary, which is really inspiring to me. Please pay attention to the term Service Envy, which must be the goal of every Service Designer and Innovator. You can also see a video interview with them here.
Service Design
livework definition: Design of experiences that reach people through many different touch-points, and that happen over time.
Service Ecology
A service ecology is the system of actors and the relationships between them that form a service. Mapping service ecologies is a process we use to establish a systemic view of the service and the context it will operate in. We map actors affected by a service and the way they relate to each other in order to reveal new opportunities and inspire ideas, and to establish an overall service concept. Ultimately, we strive to create sustainable service ecologies, where the actors involved exchange value in ways that is mutually beneficial over time.
Touch-points
Service touch-points are the tangibles that make up the total experience of using a service. Touch-points can take many forms, from advertising to personal cards, web- mobile phone- and PC interfaces, bills, retail shops, call centers and customer representatives. When we design services, we consider all touch-points in totality and craft them in order to create a clear and consistent unified customer experience. The tangible touch-points of the service is one of the key factors that determine people's experience of service quality.
Evidencing
Service evidence are designed touch-points that represent parts of a service experience. In service innovation projects we often start mapping assumptions within and outside of an organisation about the future, and animate these ideas as tangible evidence of the future. Both negative and aspirational futures are embodied as designed touch-points. We focus as much on the effects of possible designs as the design of the service itself. Therefore evidence are not only core service touch-points, but often third parties' response to an innovation such as newspaper articles describing the results of the service. This type of "archaeology of the future" enables us to make early qualitative judgments about the implications of a design. Evidencing can be done as a workshop, or as more focused production of touch-points. Ultimately it allows customers and collaborators to "play back" their own assumptions as concrete experiences rather then abstract evaluations.
Experience Prototyping
Service experiences are intangible, may take place over a lifetime and have multiple touch-points, media and modes. Therefore, services are prototyped in a different way then products. We look at prototypes of a service experience as an equivalent to the way a product or architectural model prototypes the object. We design multiple service touch-points, set the scene, the place and the time of a service experience, and establish a way for participants to suspend their disbelief, in the way that theatre is able to temporarily transport an audience. We use experience prototypes to do rapid service prototyping, involving customers, experts and clients in developing and refining services.
Service Blueprint
A service blueprint is an operational tool that describes a service in enough detail to implement and maintain it. Central to a livework blueprint is that we design around the customer's experience. Therefore, the blueprint builds on 'use cases' or 'customer journeys' through the service and all touch-points and back-stage processes defined in the blueprint are aligned to the user experience. The blueprint is used by both business process managers, designers and software engineers during development, and works as a guide to service managers that operate services on a day-to-day basis.
Service envy
We can think of products as serving two basic needs; to perform the function they are engineered to do, and to confirm and communicate the owner's set of values. The second function is crucial. Products help us identify ourselves through a complex product and brand language. If we want to make people desire services more than products, then services will also have to communicate these values. If we want to make people desire services more then products, we have to create services that help people tell each other who they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they are through the use of services instead of through ownership of things. We must create "service envy".
(Mario Morales)
Service Design
livework definition: Design of experiences that reach people through many different touch-points, and that happen over time.
Service Ecology
A service ecology is the system of actors and the relationships between them that form a service. Mapping service ecologies is a process we use to establish a systemic view of the service and the context it will operate in. We map actors affected by a service and the way they relate to each other in order to reveal new opportunities and inspire ideas, and to establish an overall service concept. Ultimately, we strive to create sustainable service ecologies, where the actors involved exchange value in ways that is mutually beneficial over time.
Touch-points
Service touch-points are the tangibles that make up the total experience of using a service. Touch-points can take many forms, from advertising to personal cards, web- mobile phone- and PC interfaces, bills, retail shops, call centers and customer representatives. When we design services, we consider all touch-points in totality and craft them in order to create a clear and consistent unified customer experience. The tangible touch-points of the service is one of the key factors that determine people's experience of service quality.
Evidencing
Service evidence are designed touch-points that represent parts of a service experience. In service innovation projects we often start mapping assumptions within and outside of an organisation about the future, and animate these ideas as tangible evidence of the future. Both negative and aspirational futures are embodied as designed touch-points. We focus as much on the effects of possible designs as the design of the service itself. Therefore evidence are not only core service touch-points, but often third parties' response to an innovation such as newspaper articles describing the results of the service. This type of "archaeology of the future" enables us to make early qualitative judgments about the implications of a design. Evidencing can be done as a workshop, or as more focused production of touch-points. Ultimately it allows customers and collaborators to "play back" their own assumptions as concrete experiences rather then abstract evaluations.
Experience Prototyping
Service experiences are intangible, may take place over a lifetime and have multiple touch-points, media and modes. Therefore, services are prototyped in a different way then products. We look at prototypes of a service experience as an equivalent to the way a product or architectural model prototypes the object. We design multiple service touch-points, set the scene, the place and the time of a service experience, and establish a way for participants to suspend their disbelief, in the way that theatre is able to temporarily transport an audience. We use experience prototypes to do rapid service prototyping, involving customers, experts and clients in developing and refining services.
Service Blueprint
A service blueprint is an operational tool that describes a service in enough detail to implement and maintain it. Central to a livework blueprint is that we design around the customer's experience. Therefore, the blueprint builds on 'use cases' or 'customer journeys' through the service and all touch-points and back-stage processes defined in the blueprint are aligned to the user experience. The blueprint is used by both business process managers, designers and software engineers during development, and works as a guide to service managers that operate services on a day-to-day basis.
Service envy
We can think of products as serving two basic needs; to perform the function they are engineered to do, and to confirm and communicate the owner's set of values. The second function is crucial. Products help us identify ourselves through a complex product and brand language. If we want to make people desire services more than products, then services will also have to communicate these values. If we want to make people desire services more then products, we have to create services that help people tell each other who they are. Our major challenge is to enable people to express who they are through the use of services instead of through ownership of things. We must create "service envy".
(Mario Morales)
Books about Innovation in Services
Sumeet Malhotra (UNISYS), Mario Morales (INNOVARE), Marc Innegraeve (BRAINDRUMS).Marc Innegraeve, CEO of BRAINDRUMS, gave me an interesting list of books about Innovation in Services. According to Marc, there are some people that have being working on this field quite a while:
I had the change to talk with Marc, and he has a great Service Innovation company in Belgium, and has developed great tools to design services. I hope he shares with us some of his secrets in the future.
I also catch some great books from the presentation of Denis Weil from Mc Donald's:
And finally, I found another interesting book of a proffessor from Harvard (Stefan Thomke):
Of course, I bought them all. I hope these books help you to find the light in your Service Innovation efforts. If you have more books or resources, plese send them to mario.innovare@gmail.com
(Mario Morales)
Great Conference
Jeneanne Rae and Mario Morales in San Diego, California, at the first conference on "Service Innovation" organized by PDMA and IIRUSA. March 21 - 23, 2007.It was great to meet you all in the Service Innovation Conference. I am opening this blog to help us share tools, ideas, resources and stories around Innovation in Services. Please send me your comments, ideas, tools, links, etc., to enrich this blog. Thank you all for your help and wish you good luck with your innovation projects. (Mario Morales).
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