Open Service Prototyping

Abstract

Service prototyping on one hand and the integration of co-creating customers or further stakeholders on the other hand, have proven to be highly beneficial for the quality, the speed-to-market, and the success of new service offerings. Prototypes support stakeholders to articulate their latent needs and thus support them to provide vital input for new service development. Service prototyping is not limited to real world simulations any more. Recent advances in IT opened up new possibilities of enhancing service development. The given cases show which potential benefits IT-enabled prototypes as well as virtual prototypes can offer companies in the tourism industries that are striving to open up their service development approaches. In particular, we distinguish between three types of prototypes that enable open service innovation: (1) real world prototypes, (2) IT-supported prototypes, and (3) virtual reality prototypes. The presented approaches for open service prototyping are valuable ways to develop, try, and test out services together with team members, customers or an unknown crowd. Their use is demonstrated through an analysis of three cases within the tourism industry.