Service Innovation: Design’s New Frontier

We know that design is becoming a vitally important part of product differentiation and revenue growth. We also know that services are accounting for an increasing proportion (now up to 80%) of the U.S. economy. Put the two together, and you get the new frontier of design: service innovation.

That’s according to Jeneanne Rae, the co-founder of Peer Insight, LLC and former principal at IDEO who’s been cited by Business Week as the “doyenne of service innovation.” Speaking at the Center for Design and Business’ ninth annual Success By Design Conference in Providence last week, Rae noted that service innovation presents tremendous opportunities for designers. But designing services is different from creating products in a few important ways:

Intangibility – services have no physical form
Heterogeneity – no two service experiences are alike
Inseparability – supplying services is inseparable from consuming services
Perishability – services cannot be inventoried

Rae suggested that, fortunately, the skills of designers are naturally suited for services innovation: empathy, abductive thinking, visualization + prototyping, iteration + testing, and integrated solutions. The raw skills though, aren’t enough. To be successful, designers need real world exposure to the unique characteristics of service innovation as early in their careers as possible, preferably while they’re still students. And organizations in services industries need to engage designers as early on in the development process as possible. But how can the two ends meet?

BIF is working on it. On May 10, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will host BIF’s next workshop, Designing Your Business: Creating A Compelling Customer Experience with Harry West and Design Continuum. The event will bring together leaders from different sectors and industries to learn about how design thinking, strategy and analysis can transform organizations.

And, we're partnering with RISD and other BIF healthcare community stakeholders to launch a Health Care Innovation Pilot that will design and test a patient-focused healthcare delivery model that demonstrates higher quality, lower cost healthcare. The project will be part of a summer class at RISD, allowing design students to gain experience in service innovation.

Stay tuned for more!

Posted May 1, 2006 09:18 AM by Matthew Guilford | Permalink