🟢 9 Strategies for service innovation
This week, let's share one of the tools of the trade of business model innovation. It's a quick and super-efficient template to help industrials create value out of services, not engineering products. Which is always quite culturally challenging for many of them.
From a business standpoint, I never differentiate products from services. Past the obvious fact that products involve a different supply chain and can be stored in boxes, the distinction is rather useless. Services can be as Capex intensive as products and might as well require years of ramp-up before becoming cash-positive. In any case, whether you deal with a product or a service, the way you work on value creation, customer problems, etc. is precisely the same.
That said, I'll admit that when key customers ask us to work on service innovation, I don't try to be technical and pontificate on why products and services are all the same. The translation for "Help us on service innovation" is usually: "How, while coming from an engineering and manufacturing culture, can we find cross-sales and up-sales that don't involve building stuff but performing something useful for customers?" Fair enough.
So what's the trick, and where to start? Let me walk you through around one of the templates I'm frequently using: