The LAB: Innovating a Service Delivery Model with S.I.T. (July 2010)
A common question about structured innovation is can it be used on services. The answer is yes. A service is the same as a product in many ways, and the approach to using an innovation method like S.I.T. is the same. Let’s consider a service example for this month’s LAB. Imagine your company was a leading uniform and apparel rental service. You own a fleet of trucks and drivers as well as uniform design and fitting services. Your company delivers custom fitted uniforms to the client’s location, picks up worn uniforms for cleaning, inspection, and repair, and returns them on schedule. In this highly competitive industry, the key to survival is to exceed customer expectations. The key to growth, on the other hand, is innovation. Let’s use the Subtraction tool on this service to create new opportunities.
We start by listing the internal components of the service line:
- uniforms (inventory)
- fitting service
- design service
- fabric
- trucks
- drivers
- billing
- pick-up
- delivery
- cleaning
- inspection
- repair
- tracking
- contract
- sales representative
We remove a component but keep all the others intact. Working backwards from this hypothetical solution, we consider what benefits it delivers or potential problems it solves. We try to consider possible benefits of the “virtual service” as is, without replacing the component with something else. Here are some examples: