Service Innovation – Rethinking Customer Needs

True service innovation demands that you shift the focus away from the solution and back to the customer. To achieve this shift in your business–one that takes you from making educated guesses to building a clear model to guide service innovation—Lance Bettencourt instructs on the finer points of how to rethink your approach to the customer’s needs: how the customer defines value in a product or service.  Among the numerous key ideas and practices are:

• Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve—and how your products deliver value to them
• Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products
• Practical guidance on staying focused on the “fuzzy front end” of service innovation
• The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy

We did not get to all of these points in the podcast with Lance. You would have to read his book,Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services to find all of them. But we did begin the conversation discussing Job-Centric Innovation, an idea that Lance is an expert on.

After several years on the marketing faculty at Indiana University, he began his career as an innovation consultant with Strategyn. His book is a melding of his personal skills and passion for services and innovation. He is currently an independent innovation speaker and trainer, providing executive education to many of the world’s leading companies.

Related Information:
The Service-dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
7 Principles of Universal Design & Beyond
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing

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