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

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.