According to a recent study by the National Academy of Engineering, services comprised 80 per cent of the US gross domestic product in 2003. And according to the OECD, they account for a similar percentage of economic activity across all of the advanced industrial economies. Yet most analyses of innovation – and certainly the syllabi of most business school classes on innovation – focus on products, not services. It is past time to update our academic curriculum for teaching and researching innovation to address the dominant sector of economic activity in most advanced economies.
Projects within this area include:
contrasting product innovation with services innovation
developing service-drive business models
aligning business models between suppliers, firms and customers
how IT enables closer cooperation with suppliers and customers, and often co-production of the service