Integrating service innovation in a product-oriented corporation

Abstract

Company X is among the largest product-oriented corporations around the world. Over the decennia which have past since its establishment, the company has been improving its New Product Development processes and they have constructed a very strong R&D department, driving product innovations. However, aware of the present importance of service offerings, they have started to integrate New Service Development into their existing processes. The company its R&D department has initiated a new function, which goal it is to drive service innovation projects, the Service Innovation Drivers. These SIDs have explicated to experience a certain level of inefficiency in their NSD projects. The goal of this thesis was to design a service innovation toolkit, to guide both them, as well as their project members through the NSD process, to increase efficiency in their NSD projects. A comparison between literature on services and NSD and a case study on NSD at the R&D department of Company X, resulted in six main subjects which could be improved to achieve more efficient NSD: (1) NSD knowledge and experience, (2) NSD process management, (3) shared understanding and knowledge sharing in NSD, (4) customer involvement in NSD, (5) organizational processes and (6) the company mindset. The first four subjects, which provided the most opportunities for this project, were molded into design criteria after which ideation commenced. Through multiple iterations a final concept developed, which was prototyped into detail. The concept is a mostly analog service innovation that consists out of multiple layers. The first layer is a new NSD framework, the second layer fixed goals per phase, the third layer a choice of actions, broader process steps, that can help in achieving the goals, the fourth layer a variety of specific methods for every action, and lastly specific templates which can be downloaded digitally. This concept aims to provide handles for NSD process, it aims to increase shared understanding, and it stimulates continuous discussion and reflection on the process and its different steps. The ultimate goal is to increase efficiency and perfomance in NSD projects at the R&D department of Company X.