Service Development Process Research Articles

New product creation process of KIBS firms: a case study

The trade-off between standardisation and customisation is one of the crucial issues in new service development. In this paper, we first review some earlier theoretical works on the formalisation of the new service development process and its impact on firm success. Thereafter, we examine existing theoretical process models for service productisation and discuss their similarities and differences regarding proposed generic design processes. A case study of productisation process in a Finnish KIBS firm operating in internet communications and marketing business highlights the usability of developed theoretical framework in a real-life context; the small-sized company has been able to capture double digit growth path in recent years.

Increased understanding of service experiences through involving users in service development

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to bring better understanding to how involving users in the development process of new mobile phone services can increase understanding of the overall service experience in a technology‐based service setting.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on an experimental setting which aims to emulate the involvement of users in a service development process in order to provide information regarding the overall service experience. This is done by letting users evaluate both user‐ and company‐created services.FindingsUsers are found to be an important information source when it comes to understanding the overall service experience of technology‐based services. The paper shows that users are to some extent better at coming up with services regarding value in use. The findings show that some of the most important experience outcomes that are demanded, functionally related outcomes, are better met by user‐created services.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper provides empirical evidence regarding the importance of a user perspective when it comes to understanding both the functional and emotional parts of the overall technology‐based service experience. The result of this paper implies a more advanced user focus during service development in order to be able to know what it is that creates value for technology‐based service users. Just how technology‐based services are functionally and emotionally experienced by their users is a fairly new research area and more empirical studies regarding this subject will be called for in the future.Originality/valueThis paper provides evidence of the importance of a user perspective when creating value propositions for technology‐based service users. From a managerial point of view, it is of interest to see whether it will be possible to learn more about the users' service experience of technology‐based services by involving them in the development process.

Developing child mental health services in resource-poor countries

Despite significant gains in tackling the major causes of child mortality and evidence of an urgent need for child mental health services, resource-poor countries continue to lag behind in child and adolescent mental health service development. This paper analyses possible barriers to the development of child mental health services in resource-poor countries and attempts to proffer solutions. Obstacles identified are the magnitude of child mental health problems that remain invisible to policy makers, an absence of child mental policies to guide the process of service development, and overburdened child mental health professionals. The belief systems about mental illness also prompt help seeking in alternative health systems, thereby reducing the evidence for the burden associated with health seeking. Solutions that may support child mental health service development are the provision of adequate advocacy tools to reveal the burden, poverty alleviation, health awareness programmes, enforcing legislation, training centred within the region, and partnerships with professionals in developed countries. These solutions require simultaneous approaches to encourage service development and utilization. Reductions in child mortality in resource-poor countries will be even more dramatic in the years to come and preparations need to be made to take care of the mental health needs of the children who will survive.

Translating Policy and Practice

Global influences and demographic changes are leading policy makers in less developed countries to look to more developed regions for policy and service ideas. Policy and services ideas may then be `borrowed' via processes such as policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996). This article explores the establishment of day care for people with dementia in Kerala, India. During the development of this service policy, information and practice ideas were transferred from different countries, particularly the UK. During the transfer of information and also within the following processes of implementation and enactment of policy, translation processes take place. In order to understand these translation processes, this article describes the development of day care in Kerala and compares its current functioning with that of similar day care centres in the UK. The concept of translation is found to illuminate and explain the process of service development in Kerala and could be used elsewhere to explain examples of policy and practice development.

A Systems Approach to Service Development in a Concurrent Engineering Environment

If a service organisation is to ensure continuous growth, long-term profitability, and ongoing competitiveness, it needs to develop new services to attract and satisfy customers. Service development is thus a key challenge for any service organisation. Such service development requires a continuous process that begins with an innovative idea and continues until the new service is introduced to the market. The process involves the planning of systems and processes, the allocation of resources, a process of quality design, the creation of prerequisites, and the ultimate realisation of the original idea. Quality is the most important prerequisite for satisfying customers and ensuring the competitiveness of a service organisation. To guarantee service quality, all phases of the service-development process must be optimised. The present paper develops a framework for a systems approach to service development in a concurrent engineering environment. The framework consists of several key design stages: (i) process design; (ii) quality design; (iii) production-management design; (iv) capacity design; (v) management design; and (vi) physical and technical design. These designs are integrated and conducted systematically in the implementation of the project to raise the overall performance of the new service. A case study is presented to illustrate the implementation process. The case study demonstrates that this integrated and systematic approach is a powerful and useful tool for new service development.

New Service Development Process

To continue to grow, more and more U.S. service firms have looked overseas in recent years to find markets for their offerings. Thus, innovation in the global context has become a strategic imperative for many service firms. While the issue of how to foster service innovation has been an area of extensive research, the cross-national comparison of innovation practices particularly between developed and emerging countries has been only a nascent field of research. To address this gap in the literature we conducted a comparative study of new service development process and stages of the financial service firms in an emerging country, India, and a developed country, the United States. The results support the central argument of the article that significant cross-national differences do exist with regard to a firm's new service development process. The findings should be of value to managers faced with the tasks of selecting and managing service innovation in emerging markets, as well as those firms experiencing international competition.

COSMO: A conceptual framework for service modelling and refinement

This paper presents a conceptual framework for service modelling and refinement, called the COSMO (COnceptual Service MOdelling) framework. This framework provides concepts to model and reason about services, and to support operations, such as composition and discovery, which are performed on them at design and run-time. In particular, the framework should facilitate the use of different service description languages tailored to different service aspects, such as the behaviour of a service and the information it manipulates, or design tasks, such as modelling, analysis and implementation. The idea is that models produced by these languages can be mapped onto the concepts of the framework, thereby facilitating one to relate these models, e.g., to verify consistency. Therefore, a requirement on the framework is to provide concepts that capture all elementary and generic service properties that are relevant during the service development process. We capture these properties by analysing existing service definitions and from earlier experience. Furthermore, we want the same concepts to be applicable throughout the service development process when modelling and refining services at successive abstraction levels. The framework distinguishes three generic abstraction levels, and describes an approach to assess the conformance between the service models produced at these abstraction levels.

Developing services for the carers of young adults with early‐onset psychosis – implementing evidence‐based practice on psycho‐educational family intervention

This paper describes a series of practice and service development initiatives to incorporate the family-inclusive approach into the newly established Early Intervention in Psychosis Service in Berkshire, England. Following a local study on carers' experiences and needs from those who cared for a young adult with a first-episode psychosis (FEP), a series of flexible services for this group of carers has been developed incorporating the much-researched psycho-educational family interventions. The findings of our local phenomenological study on the carers for young adults with FEP clearly specified the unique needs of this group of carers and that well-established approaches in family work and carers support facilities may have to be adapted to meet such needs. This paper reports the service development process through which a series of specially designed carers' services were set up for carers caring for a young adult with FEP. These services were developed to address carers' needs for knowledge, skills and support to cope with their caring roles and situation, from the stressful beginning of a potentially long caring journey.

Incorporating the views of service users in the development of an integrated psychiatric service for people with learning disabilities

Accessible summary• People with learning disabilities have told us what it was like to be looked after in general psychiatric wards and in our local psychiatric ward where four of the beds are for people with learning disabilities.• People who used mainstream wards found it quite frightening to begin with and things were not always explained very well. People who used the local ward were less worried when admitted and settled in quicker.• People who used general psychiatric wards did not always feel that their medication was explained to them properly. People who used the local ward still had some concerns about this but generally felt that medication was explained properly.• Most people said that they got on well with the other people in both types of ward and they felt that social contact with others was one of the most positive things about their admission.• People using both types of ward liked to have one nurse on the ward who they could go to if anything needed to be sorted out.SummaryDuring the 1990s, a decision was made within the Learning Disabilities services of Camden & Islington to develop a local integrated service for people requiring an acute psychiatric admission. There had been little research at the time on the experiences of people with learning disabilities within the type of inner London acute mental health service within which beds were to be located. In order to inform the development of the new service, we undertook to interview a number of service users with learning disabilities who had experienced acute admissions to general psychiatric wards during the previous three years. The information that was provided was then incorporated into the service's development process. Subsequently, a further round of interviews took place with people who had used the new service to determine whether experiences had changed and to identify areas for further service development and improvement.

Technology in the service development process: a missing dimension

The service sector being the leading part of any country's economic growth, demands an increasingly growing attention. The literature related to services discusses several aspects of the service sector but lacks in explaining the role of technology in the service development process. This paper analyses the literature pertinent to services, and establishes the important relationship of technology to the service development process. This discussion prepares a platform to study the service development process from a different perspective, which raises the need to revise the generic service development models to match the current and variable needs of the market. Recommendations are posed to enhance the service development experience by including technology as an important (driving) dimension in the service development process by categorising them for different service segments.

Service process design and/or redesign by fusing the powers of Design for Six Sigma and Lean

In today's booming service economy, providing customers with high-quality and quick services has been widely recognised as an essential means of achieving business excellence. To attain a higher quality level of service than the competitor in the market, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) has been developed as a breakthrough strategy for service process design and/or redesign, which is fundamental to the delivery of service quality to the customer. Meanwhile, a faster time-to-market capability of service can be obtained through utilising the speed advantage of Lean. Therefore, it is the motivation of this paper for researching that DFSS when combined with Lean can be synergistic in the upfront design phases of the service development process. In addition, a methodology that integrates the individual benefits of DFSS and Lean was developed, and a case study of software development process was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the methodology.

Antecedents of communication quality during the new service development process of corporate financial services

Supply chain management constitutes a relatively new and promising field of management science, affecting greatly the efficiency of Greek enterprises. The objective of this research is to detect the range of SCM applications in Greece; the trends and views of Greek enterprises in relation to efficiency, difficulties, costs, benefits and necessity, as these were generated from the implementation of one or more SCM applications. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has now proven to be an indispensable backbone for most Greek enterprises. Enterprises on the whole have stated that they have proceeded to a combination of ERP and Best of Bread systems. However, despite the valuable benefits featuring the selection of Application Service Providers ? ASP (leasing of SCM applications), it has been found that this solution has not matured yet in the consciousness of Greek companies. The great majority considers it unattractive or slightly attractive.

The Mother Who Didn't See Her Baby and the Hospital That Didn't See the Psychiatrist

This paper discusses the initiation of an infant preschool child psychiatric consultation service in a tertiary level paediatric hospital, where there had been no service such as this in the past ten years. The case presented illustrates the complex nature of both feeding disorders in infants and the cases seen in this tertiary level institution. It also describes a parallel process: The mother who was uninvolved with her infant and the hospital that was indifferent to the child psychiatric-consultation service development process. An understanding of the psychodynamic aspects of the child, the mother, and the interactions between the medical team and the child psychiatrist were crucial to the success of the treatment. This psychodynamic understanding is also essential to the development of a continuing working relationship between the child psychiatric-consultation liaison service and the hospital.

Mass customisation implementation models and customer value in mobile phones services

PurposeTo analyse the mass customisation strategies (MC) developed by mobile phone operators and to identify the types of customer value perceived by mobile phone users that customise services to their profiles.Design/methodology/approachA customer‐centre approach was adopted for analyzing MC strategies that enhance both extrinsic and intrinsic customer value. A convenience sample was surveyed for gathering data regarding the customer value dimensions perceived by users of customised mobile phone services in Greece.FindingsFindings revealed that MC strategies that are customer centred are vital as, users of customised mobile phone services perceive both “give” and “get” customer value dimensions. As MC does not come for free, to persuade customers to get involved and invest time and effort in value chain operations for designing customised services, companies need to identify and provide enhanced customer values.Research limitations/implicationsResearch findings have great implications in the new service development processes and marketing – communication strategies of mass customisers. Due to the small sample size, future research should test the wider and global generalisability of findings.Practical implicationsFindings help practitioners increase the adoption and use of mass customised mobile phone services by providing insight on how to: develop MC strategies from a customer‐centric perspective; and conduct a customer value‐based market segmentation for enhancing marketing effectiveness and MC customer adoption.Originality/valueThe MC literature is dominated by operation‐supplier approaches to MC strategies in the manufacturing sector. In services, customer involvement in value chain operations is also significant. The study contributes by suggesting a customer‐centric approach for developing MC in services that enhances customer value. The study also extends and adapts a multi‐dimensional construct for measuring customer value in customisable mobile phone services environments.

The New Service Development Process in Successful Small Entrepreneurial Firms

This original empirical work examines the development process characteristics of small entrepreneurial service firms. The results of 12 interviews suggest that successful entrepreneurial innovation projects are the result of a five-stage process model. This entrepreneurial new service development process model differs somewhat from the proposed process models, focusing on large service corporations. Besides a more flexible and informal process for entrepreneurial services, the development cost and the final market price are strongly related to success.

Determining Relationship Quality in the Development of Business-to-Business Financial Services

ABSTRACT The quality of relationships built with customers during the New Service Development (NSD) process is a current concern of researchers in relationship marketing (and NSD) and is particularly important in a highly competitive environment characterised by rapidly changing customer needs like the one of financial services. The primary relationship analyzed in relationship marketing is the one between seller and buyer, but the focal type of relationship for new product and service development is the one termed “the knowledge relationship” (Gummesson 2002), a relationship used to create knowledge. This paper reports the results of in depth qualitative research on the factors that impact on the quality of such relationships developed between new service developers and their customers during the NSD process of business-to-business financial services. Results show that the most important factors that affect relationship quality are: communication quality of the relationship; the development of strong relationship bonds; the quality of relationship partners; a strong customer orientation in NSD based on a proactive approach of relationship partners during the NSD process, and proficiency in knowledge brokering.

Market scanning for new service development

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model of narrow and broad market scanning in a service industry, including short‐ and long‐term outcomes.Design/methodology/approachIn a cross‐sectional survey, structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses on a sample of 126 hotel managers in Norway.FindingsGiven that services often involve direct interaction between the customer and the provider, customers play a more active role in the service development process. This has ramifications for how service firms scan their environment and, in turn, for incremental and discontinuous innovation. It is found that narrow and broad scanning each affect the new service development process in a unique way. Narrow scanning has a strong positive effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation; broad scanning has a weak but significant effect on profitability through incremental service adaptation, and broad scanning positively influences spin‐off knowledge.Research limitations/implicationsThe two greatest limitations of the research, which translate into important avenues for future research, are to develop a better measure of discontinuous innovation, and to test the model in an alternative setting, because hotels are very dependent on locality and surroundings.Practical implicationsWhen developing services, services managers must distinguish between short‐ and long‐term performance, and how they scan their markets. Adapting to customers to the exclusion of exploring new opportunities threatens long‐term viability.Originality/valueThe paper offers the following advice: as with organizational learning, service firms need to scan their markets by design, not default.

Successful new‐to‐the‐market versus “me‐too” retail financial services

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the role of marketing, sales, EDP/systems and operations in the ultimate success of new‐to‐the‐market vs “me‐too” retail financial services.Design/methodology/approachTo collect the data, the “dropping off” method was followed using a self‐administered questionnaire. Respondents were new service development project leaders. The unit of analysis was the service innovation project. After two follow‐up contacts, 114 usable questionnaires were returned from 64 companies, yielding a company response rate of 76 per cent and a project response rate of 68 per cent.FindingsThere are significant differences in the involvement of marketing in the stages of business analysis and marketing strategy, technical development, testing and launching, and the involvement of EDP/systems during technical development between “me‐too” and new‐to‐the‐market retail financial services. Further, in the case of new‐to‐the‐market projects, the involvement of marketing and sales positively influences performance. By contrast, the performance of “me‐too” retail financial services is positively affected by the involvement of the technical‐related functions, namely EDP/systems and operations.Research limitations/implicationsThe study offers only indirect evidence of a strong link between market orientation adoption and performance of innovative retail financial services. Future research attempts should incorporate a measurement of market orientation and examine directly its relation with the performance of major innovations. Also, the development process is only one of the many factors, which may explain variations in the performance of different new services. Future research is again needed in order incorporate in the analysis measures of such factors and refine the links that this study has revealed.Originality/valueOn the basis of the study's findings, middle and top management may reconsider their new service development process and possibly reassess their practices regarding the different roles that various functions hold during the development process.

Life Cycle Design: from general methods to product type specific guidelines and checklists: a method adopted to develop a set of guidelines/checklist handbook for the eco-efficient design of NECTA vending machines

This paper underlines and debates the importance of developing specific guidelines and checklist per product typology, as tools to make eco-efficient design become a reality. The argumentation is accompanied by the description of a project commissioned by the NECTA Vending Solutions (the European leader of drinks & food vending machines) to the DIS research unit (Design and Innovation for environmental Sustainability, Politecnico di Milano University – The DIS research unit of Politecnico di Milano University is offering, since 10 years, applied researches and company consulting on Life Cycle Design and eco-efficiency improvement. Typical consulting activities are: Life Cycle Assessment; handbook for LCD and eco-efficient product, service and product-service system development; procedure and tools to integrate environmental requirements into company existing product, service and product-service system development process; courses on LCD), resulting in such tools, currently integrated into the company product development process. The considerations are based upon on primary data and experiences. The final results of this project are two handbooks of guidelines and checklists for the eco-efficient development of two types of vending machines: one for Snack & Food (spirals model), the other for Hot & Cold drinks. In order to achieve these results an LCA has been developed and a system to prioritize guidelines has been adopted; this system has led to a procedure which moves from general to specific guidelines and checklist. Finally these tools have been integrated within the company procedure. The method adopted by DIS in this applied research is described, highlighting the observed key success factors in a project between a University research unit and a company. Final considerations expand upon the matured experiences to demonstrate the importance and efficacy to go from general methods and tools to more specific ones (e.g. specific guidelines and checklist), in order to implement Life Cycle Design principles, in the real company practices and culture.

Cultural Consultation: A Model of Mental Health Service for Multicultural Societies

Objectives: This paper reports results from the evaluation of a cultural consultation service (CCS) for mental health practitioners and primary care clinicians. The service was designed to improve the delivery of mental health services in mainstream settings for a culturally diverse urban population including immigrants, refugees, and ethnocultural minority groups. Cultural consultations were based on an expanded version of the DSM-IV cultural formulation and made use of cultural consultants and culture brokers. Methods: We documented the service development process through participant observation. We systematically evaluated the first 100 cases referred to the service to establish the reasons for consultation, the types of cultural formulations and recommendations, and the consultation outcome in terms of the referring clinician’s satisfaction and recommendation concordance. Results: Cases seen by the CCS clearly demonstrated the impact of cultural misunderstandings: incomplete assessments, incorrect diagnoses, inadequate or inappropriate treatment, and failed treatment alliances. Clinicians referring patients to the service reported high rates of satisfaction with the consultations, but many indicated a need for long-term follow-up. Conclusion: The cultural consultation model effectively supplements existing services to improve diagnostic assessment and treatment for a culturally diverse urban population. Clinicians need training in working with interpreters and culture brokers.