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