Servitizer profiled in the Sunday Business Post

We were delighted and flattered to be profiled in this weeks Sunday Business Post, the leading business newspaper in Ireland. Servitization (or service innovation) is an important trend that companies are beginning to embrace to differentiate themselves and create more value for their customers and we at Servitizer are proud to be in the vanguard of this development.

We are working with a number organisations here in Ireland and internationaly to help develop their services capability and the increasing awareness of this area of business is more relavent in todays economic climate than ever before.

Services Innovation is likely to play a key part of the Enterprise Ireland Stabilization & Growth Strategy for Indigenous Irish Businesses

Enterprise Ireland is continuing it’s strong focus on helping indigenous Irish businesses survive and grow through the current economic climate through the launch of it’s significant Stabilization & Growth Fund. The Fund was formally launched at a number of locations across the country last week.

While this fund is aimed at helping business across many different sectors, it is clear that Services Innovation will form a key part of this strategy in terms of differentiating Irish companies in the marketplace and growing incremental revenues.

Servitization, whether it be for product-oriented companies looking to build accompanying services offerings, or existing services companies looking to improve operational efficiencies, will continue to become a major influence on business strategy for sustainability and growth into the future.

Servitizer was in attendance at this launch as part of it’s role in providing Services Consultancy and Business Mentoring to Enterprise Ireland clients.

CEIA May Business Briefing

The Cork Electronics Industry Association is holding its May Business Briefing in the Maryborough Hotel in Douglas, Cork on the 19th of May at 18:30. These events are always well attended and highly regarded and this month’s guest speaker is  Servitizer’s John Flynn.

John will be presenting a topic called “The Role of Services in Evolving towards a Solution-based Strategy“, describing servitization, services innovation and services transformation.

For further information on the CEIA, visit their site at http://ceia.ie. If you are attending then John will look forward to meeting you there.

Innovation + Services

Innovation is one of the most powerful and creative forces of human nature, it has literally changed the world (for good and ill). In the commercial environment, innovation has been widely applied to and analysed against products and processes. More recently, significant study has been given to the impact of innovation on services.  Services are both major drivers of innovation and products of it.

We are currently working on some programmes that develop the relationship between innovation and services and will share some interesting highlights in upcoming blog posts starting below:

Services as an Innovation Enabler

Innovations can be loosely grouped into two catagories – incremental innovations and disruptive innovations. The development of a radical new product, process or service is often the outcome of a disruptive innovation.

Disruptive products are often built upon new, unproven or incomplete technologies and designs. Many such products stall or fail during the transition from a working prototype to a saleable comodity. This is where services can play a critical role as an innovation enabler. Services can bridge the gap between an innovative new product and a potential customers ability to use it effectively (or at all).

A great example of this exists in the early years of the photographic industry. The first generation of photography technologies and products were based upon copper and then glass plates that captured and stored still pictures. Altough these plates went through a number of incremental improvements (innovations) over a period of decades they remained expensive and cumbersome thus limiting the camera market to professionals and dedicated amateurs.

In the 1880s a disruptive new innovation began to gain some following, roll film. This promised to make cameras significantly easier to use, much more portable and less expensive to own and operate. The charge was led by one George Eastman, who saw that roll film could alter the entire market for photography products by expanding their use from the professionals to everybody.

But like many radical new innovations, refining the technology and bringing the product to market was difficult. Having made great progress on the roll film itself  and the camera that would utilize it, a gap still existed. The ordinary user could now take a photograph without specialist training but they could not be realistically expected to open and replace the roll film (let alone develop it).

One solution was to engineer the camera and film to make them user changable (something which would happen but would take time), the other solution was to servitize the camera. This is exactly what Eastman did. He launched his new camera, called the Kodak, with a complete service wrapper whereby the user purchased the camera with a 100 picture roll film already installed and once they had use all of these photos they returned the camera as a complete unit to the Eastman Company who would then return it to the customer with a new film installed and the set of developed photographs (for a healthy fee).

In this example the service was not only a profitable business model, it was the innovation enabler that made the product ready for market use. Total customer solutions have a long history then and todays product developers must consider service as a core part of the innovation cycle.

Steve