This book deals with how companies can involve customers or users in order to learn with them in the field of service-based business development. It presents a variety of customer-involvement approaches, methods for learning with customers, and the results of case studies conducted in both service and manufacturing companies focusing on value-creation through services.Based on research carried out by several research groups around the world, as well as on illustrative cases, the book creates new actionable knowledge regarding customer-involvement which will be useful for both practitioners and scholars.Benefits for readers include: an understanding of the business potential of learning with customers and other users; an overview of the fields of new service development and customer-involvement with regard to concepts, theoretical frameworks, and models, in addition to strategies and techniques for involving users in fruitful ways during the innovation process; an illustration of the cases based on the results of empirical studies; and managerial implications and guidelines regarding how to manage customer-involvement during the different phases of the new service and business development process.

Service innovation is a concept that, for the last decade, has received increased attention both among academics as well as practitioners. However, service innovation is a multi-fragmented concept which often induces confusion. The main purpose of the book is to discuss and explain what service innovation is, based on contemporary research. It explains service innovation from three different perspectives: stimulation, realization, and value capture.Stimulation: Focuses on the front-end of service innovation. It deals with structures, cultures, and processes that stimulates innovation. Idea management will be a central part of this, where the specifics with handling service ideas, both internally and externally, are illuminated.Realization: Deals with aspects on how to realize service innovations. This includes different aspects such as specific tools to be used for developing services, and also processes such as service design which aims to receive a better understanding of the customer or user. As co-creation is an important aspect of service innovation, this will also be dealt with. Finally, as many service innovations require behavior change (internally within the organization and externally among the receiving parties), this will also be covered.Value capture: Companies transitioning to become more service-oriented discover the need to reconsider old business models in order to capitalize on their service offerings. Services are often taken for granted and included in the price. This book will addresses the problem of going 'from free to fee'. In addition, the book also deals with the difficulties that involve moving from a traditional product-oriented logic to a more contemporary service-logic.

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? (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. Despite the heightened focus on service in society, most models and theories of innovation are based on that the norm is a physical good. We believe that the norm is actually experiential and service based. This book addresses this mismatch of theory and practice for the benefit of those who are seeking to understand, teach, and practice service innovation.