ISSIP.org – What Should A Service Innovation Professional Know in 2015?

Steve Kwan (SJSU), Yassi Moghaddam (ISSIP), Jim Spohrer (IBM) met on Friday August 14, 2015 at the SJSU office Bunker Hill Drive, Santa Clara to develop a draft ISSIP Self-Assessment for Service Innovation Professionals. This document is the output from that meeting.

The motivating questions were:

What should a service innovation professional know?

Can we design a draft self-assessment for service innovation professionals?

Can this evolve into an annual student team project competition?

How can the self-assessment and body-of-knowledge be improved each year?

 

Meeting goals:

(1) Create an assignment that can be given to student teams to create new and improved self-assessments each year.

(2) People should be able to take a self-assessment and complete it in less than fifteen (15) minutes.

(3) The service innovation assessment should have three parts (a) vocabulary and concepts, (2) methods and frameworks, (c) challenges and opportunities.

(4) Student teams should create five objective questions, two subjective questions, and one open ended question for each section – so a total of eight (8) questions per section. Therefore, the full assessment should include twenty-four (24) questions in total – with an average of 30 seconds to answer each question. If the subjective and open ended questions prove to take too much time, template paragraphs can be used with fill-in the blanks, with hints revealing items that can be used to fill in a blank.

(5) Student teams can compete each year to submit a revised assessment, and the winning assessments would be posted to the ISSIP website: Assessment 2015, Assessment 2016, Assessment 2017, etc. – changing each year, reflecting the evolution of the body-of-knowledge, topical cases referenced in questions, and better/more compelling items.

(6) Faculty teaching students about service science and other service innovation related courses or degree programs, can challenge the students to take the ISSIP Assessment and run a competition in their class for teams to create new and improved assessments.

(7) To accompany the assessment, a body-of-knowledge document will include references to academic articles, business articles, and news stories related to items in the assessment. The body-of-knowledge will just be a short paragraph and diagram with a reference pointer to specific vocabulary and concepts, methods and frameworks, as well as opportunities and challenges. Less is more.

(8) This document can be given to student teams for them to create ISSIP Self-Assessment 2015 and ISSIP BOK (Body-of-knowledge) 2015. Their documents can be submitted to ISSIP for review, and a possible prize for the top submissions (both assessment and body-of-knowledge). Awards are based on the quality of the revised/updated Self-Assessment, Body-Of-Knowledge, and the number and quality of assessment responses and analysis (how many people took the new self-assessment quiz).

(9) The next step is to “reverse engineer” the assessment below, to begin to define the concepts and references for the body-of-knowledge/book-of-knowledge.

 

Initial draft of assessment by section

Each person (taking turns) worked on a part of the assessment. Each person created a section draft, presented it, and got some feedback on the questions. This is the initial compilation of all those initial drafts.

Vocabulary and Concepts

Objective 1: Which of the following are valid definitions of service

Objective 2: Which of the following are services

Objective 3: Which of the following are stakeholders in a metropolitan bus service system?

Objective 4: In the following which is the correct description of difference between goods dominant logic and service dominant logic?

Objective 5: Which of the following methods are used to describe customer service journeys.

Objective 6: Which one of the following is a definition of “Service”?

Objective 7: Which one of the following is a definition of “innovation”?

Objective 8: Which one of the following is a definition of “Service Innovation”?

Objective 9: Which one of the following are Operand resources?

Objective 10: Which one of the following are Operant resources?

Objective 11: Which one of the following describes Value?

Objective 12: Which one of the following describes Value Co-Creation?

Subjective 1: How can services provide value to the customer?

Subjective 2: What are the legal boundaries of value propositions for services?

Subjective 3: Describe how service qualities can be measured.

Subjective 4: Describe the differences between the front stage and back stage of a servicescape.

Subjective 5: Describe what is a Service System?

Subjective 6: Describe whether data is Operand or operant resource and why?

Open ended 1: Construct a value proposition that can be used by a provider (X) to compete for customer (Y)

Open ended 2: What is Service Dominant logic?

 

Methods and Frameworks

Objective 1: Which of the following are important service innovation methods: (1) service blueprint, (2) service innovation triangle, (3) business design canvas, (4) all of the above.

Objective 2: Which of the following are important service innovation related frameworks: (1) service-dominant logic, (2) service science, (3) viable systems approach, (4) all of the above.

Objective 3: True/False: There are many alternative approaches to service design.

Objective 4: True/False: Multiple stakeholder perspective must be considered when exploring alternative value propositions in a new service design.

Objective 5: True/False: There is a single best service innovation method for every business or societal challenge.

Objective 6: Service Blueprinting is best used for: <choices + all of the above>

Objective 7: Which one of the following demonstrates a business model based on value co-creation? <choices + all of the above>

Objective 8: Ecosystem of innovation – Which one the following businesses have built innovative ecosystems? <choices + all of the above>

Objective 9: Which one of these is an example of ethnographic interviewing? <choices + all of the above>

Objective 10: Divergent thinking is part of which one of the processes below? <choices + all of the above>

Objective 11: Which one of the following methods helps is important in Service Design? <choices + all of the above>

Subjective 1: Describe the strengths and limitations of service blueprinting.

Subjective 2: Describe the most important service innovation in the last ten years and which service innovation method could have been used to generate it.

Subjective 3: Describe systems modeling from a service innovation perspective.

Subjective 4: Describe data analytics for services (customer assessment of service quality) from a service innovation perspective.

Subjective 5: Describe what is Open innovation, and 3 examples of business that have open innovation platform.

Open ended 1: What are the most important state of the art methods and frameworks that service innovation professional should know today.

 

Challenges and Opportunities

Objective 1:  Which of the following are important current challenges of today’s service innovation professionals:  (1) how to improve service quality while decreasing service operation costs, (2) how to create an improve platform that allows more customer co-creation of value, (3) all of the above

Objective 2: Which of the following are important future opportunities for today’s service innovation professionals: (1) how to use cognitive systems to improve the creativity and productivity of employees and customers? (2) how to create more T-shaped employees and customers, (3) all of the above

Objective 3: True/False:  Jeremiah’s Owyang’s website is a top source of information about the collaborative economy.

Objective 4: True/False: Technology innovation is a major disruptor of traditional service businesses.

Objective 5: True/False: Government policy is a major knob for accelerating or decelerating the amount of service innovation in regions.

Subjective 1:  Describe the public policy challenges associated with a collaborative economy startup (e.g., Uber).

Subjective 2: Describe the organizational change challenges associated with the servitization of a specific manufacturing company (e.g. Taiwan Semiconductor).

Subjective 3: What are some of the reasons that the health care is so expensive in the US?

Subjective 4: What can service innovation professionals in health care do to help reduce costs in the US?

Subjective 5: How can service quality be maintained when service providers subcontracts by cost arbitrage?

Subjective 6: What are some of the challenges in providing service to a multi-cultural customer base?

Subjective 7: What are some of the challenges of the so-called sharing economy (esp. skills and trust)?

Subjective 8: What are some of the challenges of non-market-based service systems?

Open ended 1: What are the most important current challenges and future opportunities facing service innovation professional today?

Open ended 2: In the course of week list the types of service offerings you depended on. Compare the list today to the list ten years ago. Twenty years ago.

 

Body of Knowledge

Includes for each item, definition URL reference(s), plus types and ideally positive and negative examples:

Service, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Innovation, Technology Innovation, Business Model Innovation, Social Innovation, Service Innovation, Top Service Innovation in History, Value, Value Co-Creation, Stakeholders of a service system, Service-Dominant Logic, Goods-Dominant Logic, Customer service journey, Operand resource, Operant resource, Service System, Customer, Provider, Value Proposition, Legal Boundary, Measures, Service Quality, Productivity, Cost, Servicescape, Front stage, Back stage, Resources, People, Technology, Organizations, Information/Data, Service Innovation Methods, Service Blueprinting, Service Innovation Triangle, Business Model Canvas, Service Design, Ethnography, Ethnographic Interviews, Systems Modeling, Systems Thinking, Design Thinking, Service Thinking, Data Analytics, Customer Modeling, Open Innovation, Servitization, Service Innovation Frameworks, Service Dominant Logic, Service Science, Viable Systems Approach, Stakeholders, Challenge, Business Challenge, Societal Challenge, Business Model, Ecosystem, Innovation Ecosystem, Divergent Thinking, Method Strengths and Weaknesses,  Platform, Service Operations, Costs, Productivity, Compliance, Learning, Run-Transform-Innovate, Cognitive Systems, Collaborative Economy, Sharing Economy, Peer-to-peer Economy, Customers, Employees, T-shaped Professionals, Entrepreneurial Researchers, Government, Public Policy, Organizational Change, Arbitrage, Multi-culture Factors, Human Factors, Skills, Trust, Market-based Service Systems, Non-Market-based Service Systems, Human-Centered Service Systems

 

Concluding Remarks

 This draft will be augmented with a body-of-knowledge document with references. This is the reverse engineering next stage of this work.

 

References

Service-dominant logic website: http://sdlogic.net/

Jeremiah Owyang’s Collaborative Economy website: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/

Service Thinking website: http://groupcvc.com/

ISSIP website: http://www.issip.org