Need a way to discover new concepts for your service?
Blue Ocean Strategy contains a few tools that give a great way to look at and discover New Service Concepts (one of five dimension in our services innovation model).
We take Gallouj & Weinstein's idea that a service is a matrix of four sets of characteristics. And say those characteristics are the attributes in a Blue Ocean Canvas. Then, using the Blue Ocean Four Actions Framework we can ideate service concepts by either raising, reducing, creating or eliminating characteristics.
The resulting new service concepts nicely adhere back to Gallouj & Weinstein's categorisation of service innovations: radical, improvement, incremental, ad-hoc, recombinative (architectural) and formalisation
So, you have an idea for a service innovation, how can you best describe the impact of it on your organisation?
We find that the extension to den Hertog's service innovation model we have made is a great tool for this
(and when used in combination with the Lean Canvas Model, we get a great insight into the value
How do we find/discover new service innovations?
If we have just a product, then we can look to service-ise that
If we currently have a service, we can use our extended version of den Hertog's model to seek innovations. These could improve the service concept, the service delivery (internal, new partners, new systems etc) or the client interface. They could be based on technology and/or data
We (overly) pressurise our innovation approaches by seeking new to the world innovations. Do we need to?
Miles and others argue that a specific type of service organisation - knowledge intensive based services (KIBS) - can be sources, facilitators or carriers of innovation
But it is not just KIBS. Don't task-limit your innovation approach to being a source of innovation. Expand it to have a role as facilitators and carriers.
And we can note that carrying innovation - such as QR codes across industries - is particularly powerful and increasingly demanded by customers
Having ideas is great; and capturing and turning them into innovations is a process that has generated many tools, advice and innovation consultants.
But to fix the innovation problem (94% of executives unhappy with innovation performance) we need to go further.
We need to make sure innovations are implementable in an organisation; and further that we are implementing innovations that are generating value for customers and ourselves.
