SERVICE BLUEPRINT

Service Blueprint

Service Blueprint

Services represent approximately 80 percent of the U.S. GDP and a growing percentage of the GDPs of countries around the world. Companies, governments, and universities around the world have recently awakened to the realization that services dominate global economies and economic growth.Yet, in practice, innovation in services is less disciplined and less creative than in the manufacturing and technology sectors.' As anecdotal evidence of this, we point to a 2007 Business Week cover story featuring the world's most innovative companies? While Business Week's top twenty five most innovative companies includes a number of service businesses (e.g., Google, Walt Disney, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Target, Amazon and E-Bay), the number of innovators is not nearly reflective of the size of the service sector. A recent comprehensive review of the academic literature on product innovation also reveals little explicit coverage of research on service innovation."

There are many reasons for this historic lack of rigorous attention to the unique aspects of service innovation. Some of these reasons are rooted in the remnants of the industrial revolution and the habitual fascination with tangible products and hard technologies as a source of product innovation, and an underlying belief that service(s) have no tangible value. ' Beyond these historic reasons, however, the lack of widespread and disciplined innovation in services derives at least partially from the nature of services themselves. Services are process and experience based and in many cases dependent on human, interpersonal delivery systems, suggesting a need to focus on process, delivery, and experience, innovation. Yet, traditional product innovation tools emphasize the design of tangible, relatively static products with physical properties, Service( s) are fluid, dynamic, and frequently co-produced in real time by customers, employees, and technology, often with few static physical properties. Thus, many of the invention protocols and prototype design techniques used for physical goods, hard technologies, and software do not work well for human and interactive services, or at least they demand significant adaptation to address service innovation challenges."

Along with the awakening to the domination of services in the world's economies, there is a growing emphasis in business practice on creating meaningful, memorable customer experiences? The fundamental premise is that firms can no longer compete solely on providing superior value through their core products, but rather they must move into the realm of customer experience management, creating long-term, emotional bonds with their customers through the co-creation of memorable experiences potentially involving a constellation of goods and services. The importance of customer experience management is not only being touted in consumer markets, but also in business-to-business contexts where research shows meaningful customer experiences and the resulting emotional bonds between customers and suppliers are more important than rational motivations in creating customer loyalty.

The compelling need for service innovation in the world's economies and the current focus of many businesses on creating value through customer experiences suggest a need for innovative methods, techniques, and R&D practices for service(s). The purpose of this article is to describe one such technique-service blueprinting-a customer-focused approach ...