New book: Service Innovation

CTF Professors Anders Gustafsson, Per Kristensson and Lars Witell, are together with Professor Gary Schirr at Radford University, the authors behind the new book "Service Innovation”.

CTF Professors Anders Gustafsson, Per Kristensson and Lars Witell have teamed up with Professor Gary Schirr at Radford University, in the new book "Service Innovation".

"We are delighted that our book on service innovation finally is available in English. The basis for the book is research from several research projects that has been carried out over multiple years at our research center. It builds on the idea that the customer/user/consumer is an important contributor in the innovation process", says Professor Anders Gustafsson, CTF.

The book "Service Innovation" is an English version of the Swedish book "Tjänsteinnovation" (2014) written by Anders Gustafsson, Per Kristensson and Lars Witell. For the English version the researchers teamed up with Professor Gary Shirr, Radford University.

"When writing an English version of our Swedish service innovation book we decided not do a direct translation but rather develop it and expand the book in new directions as well as to adopt it to a US context. Consequently, we invited Gary Shirr as part of our team. He is an excellent fit to our team and brings in new knowledge and expertise", says Anders Gustafsson.

Service innovation
All the world's most advanced economies are dominated by service. The service sector also employs the largest number of people and it is the fastest growing sector, both in number of companies and employees. The questions posed in the book are: (1) How is it growing; (2) what are these new service innovations; (3) what are the drivers; and (4) how can organizations work with service innovations in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. Based on this view, we develop a model of service innovation and develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective; how should an organization view its customers in order to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.