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On Thursday, October 7, Pim den Hertog will defend his dissertation Managing Service Innovation. Firm-level Dynamic Capabilities and Policy Options at the University of Amsterdam. The dissertation focuses on the transition from a goods-dominant to a services-dominant innovation paradigm at the enterprise and policy levels. In his dissertation, Pim den Hertog presents two models.
The 6D Service Innovation Model distinguishes between a new service concept, a new way of interacting with customers, one or more new business partners, a new revenue model, and new ways to deliver a service organisationally and/or technologically. The model can be used as a tool to map and analyse individual service innovations, as well as to systematically create new service experiences and solutions.
A second model is based on the idea that service innovation is a process that can be consciously and systematically managed. Service-dominant enterprises aiming to evolve into true service innovators and repeatedly bring successful new services to the market can use six so-called dynamic service innovation capabilities: A) identifying and exploring user needs and technological options; B) conceptualising new services (or service design); C) bundling and unbundling elements that make up a service experience or solution; D) co-producing and orchestrating services that require input from multiple actors; E) scaling and 'stretching' services; F) learning and adapting the service innovation management process itself. Successful service innovators invest in distributed, enterprise-specific mixes of these dynamic service innovation capabilities and align them with the specific enterprise strategy. This generic set of six dynamic service innovation capabilities is a tool for management to reflect on the enterprise-specific mix of distributed service innovation (meta-)skills that are part of the knowledge and expertise of a set of managers and employees spread throughout the enterprise. This distributed model of service innovation contrasts sharply with the archetypal central R&D management model, which is mainly based on technological R&D in the manufacturing industry.
Furthermore, an argumentation is developed for and a perspective on service innovation policy. One of the conclusions in the dissertation is that service innovation policy often lacks an innovation system perspective. When establishing an argumentation for service innovation policy, system failure should, in addition to (rather than only) market failure, be the starting point. Current service innovation policy is currently too much dominated by an assimilation and demarcation perspective. Above all, there is a lack of a vision on how services are embedded (and therefore can be facilitated) in existing innovation systems and how innovative services can contribute to the overall innovativeness and competitiveness of these innovation systems. Knowledge-Intensive Business Services play a key role as intermediaries in these more service-dominant innovation systems.