How the culture of an organisation is essential for service innovation

Is it possible with for a company or a government to work with service innovation without a strong culture?

Involving costomer in a service innovations process require both knowledge and leadership. Many times it depends more on specific persons in the organisation if this process works. If this person is a leader there are good preconditions for a strong culture that can lay a foundation for service innovation.

I believe that a culture for service innovation needs to focus on the staff and a bottom up perspective. There are three important aspects to do so:

• a structure that encourage creativity
• preconditions for staff to be motivated and happy
• a strategy and model for service innovation (Gustafsson https://youtu.be/kb30Q8y0CFc)

A strong culture is a balance of feelings and structure. A culture that allow staff to try, take risks and fail sometimes. Hopefully taking risks will lead to brilliant results more than failure. An environment where people who never make mistaces don´t work hard enough. Involving customers and citizens will most certainly ad more risk to an organisation. In my mind this need strong leadership and a good working environment.

A strong culture needs a vision and goals so that people know what to do and where to go. One of the biggest motivations for people to work hard is a sence of mening. What is the purpose of our organisation? We have all heard the story of the three brick builders. A man walked by and asked What are you doing? The first one answered I´m laying bricks. The second one answered I´m building a wall. Finally the man asked the third builder, he smiled and said I´m buildning a cathedral.

Perhaps it is possible to work with service innovation without a strong culture, but I wouldn´t take that risk if I was a leader.

Open innovation - a love story!

About two years ago I "fell in love" with open innovation. I had been thinking about different aspects in public transport that was going on, for example Travel hack. I had been on a conference and tried speed innovation (which by the way didn´t go very well). All these activities were quite confusing for me. Then suddenly someone mentioned open innovation and Henry Chesbrough and all pieces fell into place like a puzzel. And I was in love with a theory.

Open innovation is a wonderful concept but there seems to be several limitations, especially in private sector. In public sector it could really be a shift of paradigm, and it already is in many cases. In public sector we don´t have to worry som much about sharing and negative consequences. For us it is much easier to collaborate, open up our data and involve users, and other relevant stakeholders.

I also love the concept om smart cities. If we use the basics of open innovation and combine that with smart cities we could lay a foundation of a sustainable development and a smart system om mobility.

Can a service innovation exist or not depending on the customer?

Last Sunday I went with my son to a regular sport activity for parents and kids. While we were waiting to start I overheard two fathers talking. One of them asked the other about his activity tracking wristband, what do you have there? How does it work? Do you like it? What can it do for you? Basically he was curious if the other father had gain any value with this product. 

The other father answered, it is suppose to measure all my acitivity and other stuff that I don´t know. I got this for Christmas from my wife but I honestly don´t know how to use it and what information I can get from it. I just keep it on my arm because it makes my wife happy.

After reading Skålen et al. (2015) I started to think about this situation and the importance of co-creation. For this father his very expensive wristband had no value what so ever for him. Apparently it had some value for his wife. In order to gain value for him a direct interaction with the firm would be necessary. 

So this got me thinking about the Service-Dominant logic perspective. Is it possible to say that one service or product can be an innovation for one person but not for another one?

Service innovation and public sector relationship with citizens

The public sector has had citizen dialogue for many years. The objective is quite obvious, to give the citizens a voice in a specific or general public sector question. Often we see this when something going to be build or change, that affect the public in a community. It could be building a new park or library. Citizen dialogues are also common when it comes to the process of deciding on a future vision for a city for example. 

A lot of citizen dialogues are perhaps more consultation and less dialogue. When it comes to service innovation logic it becomes interesting when a citizen dialogue is taken one step further and actually becomes co-creation. The users role changes in a fundamental way when the citizens and other stakeholders are involved in developing new projects or ideas.

In co-creation the role of the citizen is changed. Now the citizens are actually given part of the power to design the questions and even decide on the final plan or project.

The good kitchen project from Denmark is an interesting example of co-creation with relevant stakeholders. A consultant firm got the assignment to improve the meals for elderly people bacause they were malnourished. Instead of just focusing on more nutrition in the food they involved all relevant stakeholders in a design thinking process. They found out that the problem was so much larger than just the nutrition in the food. 

The problem of malnourished elderly was not really about the food itself, it was about the setting, presentation, not being able to choose food and feelings about eating alone. A deep understanding of the need of the customer led to a successful result. The employees that made the food also participated and their role has changed fundamentaly. They decided to look at the service as a restaurant. Then they became the chiefs, the elderly were guests and the delivery servants. The employees could now make a menu with different choices and use their expertice of cooking in a profound way

The role of the customer has changed from just being a passive receiver of food to be able to choose what to eat from a menu. For the user, the elderly people, there were a great deal of value integration. Not only did they get more nutrition in the food, thay also became empowered and happy! This also applied for the staff preparing the food.

I hope I'm not too brave to argue that this is a good example of service-logic innovation in public sector.

http://www.servicedesigntoolkit.org/cases-good-kitchen.html
http://www.dienstleistungsmarketing.ch/documents/michel2008cmrinnovatecustomersnotproducts.pdf

Is service innovation always good for both the customer and the company?

Last week I had some personal experience with service innovation at a skiing resort. I had rented our skis before and had them delived to our cabin. That was really nice and we saved a lot of time. But my ten year old son did not get any poles. When I called the rentalstore they said that they don´t provide poles for children for this particular delivery service. Anyone that have done downhill skiing knows that a ten year old needs ski poles. So I asked if I could come and get a pair in person to the store but then they said that they were all gone.

This really nice service turned out not to be so nice after all. I like the idea of customer journey mapping. That means that the company providing the service acually follow the customer all the way, from making a decision about the service to the end. If they had done so perhaps their service would have been different. (http://www.smartinsights.com/user-experience/customer-experience-management-cxm/mapping-customer-journey/)

Who is the customer?

It is quite obvious that the customer is central in service innovation. But sometimes it is not clear who the customer is. If value is gained only in relation with our customer it is very important to know who the customer is. Once we define who the customer is, we can focus on service innovation to make society better.

My work experience is only from the public sector. We often don´t use the word customer. We rather talk about citizens or inhabitants. Eventually it is the citizens that are the customers of public services. Even if not all the citizens use public service, all should feel some kind of satisfaction with the service available.

But who the customer is can be a bit fuzzy depending on where in the public sector you are as an officer. For example I work in an administration that serves a political body. All the officers produce papers for decision making. In everyday work that makes the politicians our customers. Based on the literature I draw the conclusion that the inclusion of citizens in both the definition of the problems and in the design of solutions for all kind of public sector is a good start for service innovation.

Accordning to Gustafsson and Johnson (2003) a service strategy is based on a triangle of maintenance, performance and innovation. If I try to apply that to my work and public transport the service maintenance is about getting the bus from A to B according to the timetable. Improve service performance is about things like the system of payment, information applications like travelplanner and wifi onboard. When it comes to service innovation it is for example travelhack for thirdpart developers or a service for combined mobility offered by the public transport company.

The Venn diagram is used by Gustafsson and Johnson to find a service advantage. Public transport competes with mainly the car but also with walking and cycling. For society as a whole walking and cycling are better since there are zero emissions. It is also better for public health. So if I then compare public transport with driving a car some interesting things appear.

Most of the time a car is faster except for longer distance trainrides or in areas with congestions. Public transport is always cheaper if people calculate with the correct cost of driving a car. Riding with public transport open up an opportunity to use traveltime for other purposes like working or reading. 

I think it could be a great idea to look at other similar businesses like airlines and try to learn about service innovation for regional public transport. I believe it is important to build a culture around the habit of travelling with public transport. And focus much more on linked activities that actually solve the problem for the citizen and at the same time be part of something bigger. Public transport is more about accessibility to workplaces, attractive areas than it is about busses and trains.

Peer to peer

MOOC, what a fantastic way to learn new things. Imagine what a possibility it is for people in remote areas with less resources. But it is also a great opportunity for a person like me, with no time available to attend a physical course. But the thing that I like most with MOOCs are a chance to meet people from different cultures but with a common interest here and now. The feeling of peer to peer is pretty cool. But in order for that to happen we need to share. So massive open online courses are really about sharing, learning and sharing. This course Mastering service innovation seems to focus on sharing and colleboration. Which is great! I have high expectations on myself for this course. I want to spend time and effort to make it work.

My academic bakground is basically a masterdegree in Geography from the university of Gothenburg. If I was young today I would have made a different choice since I'm very interested in economics and the innovation process. I'm curious about design thinking as a systematic way of working with innovation. Since I work in the public sector I'm curious how we can work with service innovation there. Especially when it comes to user innovation and citizen involvement. The concept of open innovation is very attractive. The question is if it really works. For the public sector it is much easier to be open with data for example. For some industries it might be more difficult. Well, lets find out more later in the course.