Service Management Foundations

Question 1

What are the 4 layers of innovation in services?

Answer 1

1. Service-based innovation: Why and For Who?
2. The concept of service: What?
3. Organizational Innovation: How?
4. The methods and resources implemented: With what and with whom?

Question 2

What is the most delicate layer for service companies? Why is that?

Answer 2

2. The concept of service: What?
   - The specificity of the offer and commitments

Designers rapidly create the service to be offered, without specifying their commitments and defining values which hinders the creation of trust.

Question 3

What are the conditions for effective innovation in services?

Answer 3

1. Macroeconomic conditions
   - Organization
   - Coordination, producing and distributing knowledge
   - Service relationship skills
2. Macro-sociological / Systematic conditions
   - Institutional control conditions
   - Conditions regarding connections between services (the existence of complimentary services)
   - Conditions for distribution and appropriation (issues regarding the inability to patent services)

Question 4

What is the service paradox / Baumol’s cost disease?

Answer 4

Salaries increase in service sectors not because of higher labour productivity, but because of rising salaries in other sectors.

Question 5

What are the operational and organizational inputs to production?

Answer 5

• Competences
• Labour (man-hours)
• Materials
• Facilities
• Network of suppliers

Question 6

What are the 5 characteristics of a service?

Answer 6

• Heterogeneity
• Simultaneity
• Perishability
• Intangibility
• Customer Participation

Question 7

What are the 4 things a business must get right during service design?

Answer 7

• The Offering: Which service attributes deliver the experience customers wants?
• The Funding Mechanism: How will excellent service be paid for?
• The Employee Management System: How are your people able and motivated to deliver excellent service?
• The Customer Management System: How are customers educated and motivated to behave in desired ways?

Question 8

What is an innovative service according to Barcet?

Answer 8

A service that changes the consumers’ life.

Question 9

What are the 3 interaction patterns of elastic coordination?

Answer 9

• Surfacing boundaries
• Discovering discontinuities
• Parsing solutions

Question 10

What are the steps in the process of creativity?

Answer 10

Creativity actually follows a process
of recognition/preparation, incubation, insight and validation/refinement.