Creating New Markets Through Service Innovation

By Leonard L. Berry, Venkatesh Shankar, Janet Turner Parish, Susan Cadwallader and Thomas Dotzel January 1, 2006

Many companies make incremental improvements to their service offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that generate new markets or reshape existing ones. To move in that direction, executives must understand the different types of marketcreating service innovations as well as the nine factors that enable these innovations.

Why Service Businesses Are Not Product Businesses

By Satish Nambisan
July 15, 2001

What company in a service business has not weighed the advisability of offering products? The software industry provides instructive examples but their attempts to cross the chasm have met with grim results: Approximately 87% of software service companies product initiatives failed. On five key issues intellectual property rights, product complementarity, returns from scale, abstracting knowledge and connections with users service companies and product companies are often at opposite poles. Five case studies show why service companies must modify the service mind-set to suit the product market, but without giving up their unique service-sector insights.

Growing Negative Services

By Ivor Morgan and Jay Rao April 1, 2006

Negative services -- those that are needed in emergencies, when problems arise or to ensure against unwanted outcomes -- are part of most businesses and central to many. Their very nature presents unique growth challenges.

Applying Cost of Quality to a Service

Business
By Lawrence P. Carr July 15, 1992

XEROX RECEIVED THE MALCOLM BALDRIGE QUALITY AWARD IN 1989 FOR ITS MANUFACTURLNG OPERATIONS. A KEY ELEMENT IN ITS PROGRAM WAS INSTITUTING a system of quality cost measures. The system helped managers determine the costs of activities such as inspecting products, making excessive engineering changes, doing rework, and repairing substandard equipment. But when it was time for the companys U.S. marketing division to join the quality bandwagon, managers had to come up with whole new definitions and measurements. This article explains how they adapted cost of quality concepts to a service business with dramatic results.

How Can Service Businesses Survive and Prosper?

By Roger W. Schmenner April 15, 1986

Given the competitive spirit of the service sector, the time has come for service businesses to recognize that they are really a part of a larger whole, and not merely unique, entrepreneurial entities unto themselves. In fact, the author of this article warns that if service businesses remain isolated from one another, their mortality rate will continue to rise. Through the use of a service matrix, the author shows how service businesses can broaden their professional relationships with other services that have similar operations and managerial challenges, and in so doing, gain the economic foothold needed to survive and prosper.

Taking the Measure of Outsourcing Providers

By David Feeny, Mary Lacity and Leslie P. Willcocks April 15, 2005

Successful outsourcing of back-office business functions requires knowing not only your company's needs but also the 12 core capabilities that are key criteria for screening suppliers.