Service Productivity and Innovation

This last chapter concludes the challenges of service productivity and point out that is more important than ever to be able to manage it. As services become an increasingly significant part of most economies, so ensuring their health and ability to make an effective contribution to employment and economic growth becomes a key issue. All of these concerns point towards the need for innovation—changes across the spectrum from incremental to radical. The targets of service innovation involve the service offering itself (analogous to product innovation), the underlying process whereby the service offering is created and delivered (process innovation), the target market and underlying ‘story’ (‘position innovation’) and the dominant business model underpinning the service value proposition (‘paradigm’ or business model innovation). Managed effectively service innovation can improve and enhance productivity (‘doing what we do but better’) and also open up radical new ways of meeting societal needs. The chapter summarizes the key learnings from the different perspectives and ends with a forecast how service productivity and service innovation might evolve in the future. In that way this chapter provides service managers with guidance as to how they can improve their productivity by learning from appropriate methods in order to amend service productivity, quality, and profitability.