The challenge
Servitization is a trend we see in almost all industries throughout the world. This is why it makes sense to title this Design Options Paper (DOP) “All Companies are Service Companies”. This customer demand-driven focus is not new, but it is poorly practiced despite being perceived by leading corporations as the only way to sharpen their competitive position.
Today it’s not enough to generate excellent products or services for customers, it’s about meeting their needs and providing good experiences by offering a customer-focused combination of goods, services, support, self-service and knowledge.
The aim of this DOP is to offer policy makers distilled knowledge and recommendations in order that they can help facilitate their regional industries to embrace a new, service innovation driven, competitiveness logic.
Objectives
It is recognised by the European Commission and the PLIS partners that Service Innovation can play a key role in maximising the economic impact of SMEs at local, national, regional and international level.
In this sense, the PLIS Design Options Paper titled “All companies are service companies” aims at increasing knowledge and experience on how innovation policies should be designed and implemented in order to:
• Increase awareness of the importance of Service Innovation and how it aligns with other existing innovation support services.
• Support the upgrading and adaptation of the regional industries through a Service Innovation approach.
• Increase operational efficiency amongst innovation agencies in delivering Service Innovation support.
• Increase the number of innovation projects developed by SMEs within a Service Dominant approach and their impact on company competitiveness.
The conclusion
A shift in focus like this has profound implications for both company activities and innovation policies. For the companies, the changes are seen in the demand for new or changed employee competences, the need for new strategies and new ways of collecting insights to develop value propositions that meet customers’ needs. Whereas the implications for innovation policy makers are the need to develop and promote new initiatives that can inform, motivate and support companies to shift their focus from being technology and goods focused towards being focused on the job-to-be-done (JTBD) in order to create customer value.
When developing innovation policies, it is important to follow an integrative approach. The policy response to this new Service-dominant logic (S-D logic) approach is subtle and evolutionary. It requires a cultural shift in policy thinking and action where support is more equitably distributed across more types of innovation and where value that is generated from non-technology and non-product innovation is equally recognised.
It has been difficult to find examples where we (the PLIS partners) have helped a company to work strategically in transforming their business towards S-D logic. Basically, this is because most of the current innovation support provided is still based on an assimilation approach, where Service Innovation is not truly considered from the start, but is viewed as an add on to technology and product development. Therefore, our research has drawn on academic evidence and global examples combined with the knowledge and experience we have about current policy initiatives and tools that are already working to support service innovation in companies.
