Driving Service Productivity

John Bessant is Director of Research and holds the Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Exeter Business School. He has advised a number of companies, various national governments, and several international bodies-including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the OECD.

Claudia Lehmann is senior researcher at the Center for Leading Innovation and Cooperation (CLIC) at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. As a consultant she supported several major German companies in the planning and controlling of R&D projects.

Kathrin M. Möslein is Chair of Information Systems - Innovation & Value Creation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and professor of management and member of the team of directors at the Center for Leading Innovation & Cooperation (CLIC) at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management.

In a world moving towards services, driving service productivity is a central challenge for leaders and members of all types of organisations: for service businesses there is a clear need to be "productive", but it is far less clear what this exactly means. In this book, we invite you on a journey that explores the ways, tools and options for driving service productivity. We take an innovator's perspectives and look at the tricky challenge of service productivity as a landscape of options for designing the future of services.

Case examples, from the airport, hotel, healthcare, and professional service industry, offer insights in the methods used and approaches taken in business practice. Research results provide food for thought and valuable advice on the path towards superior service productivity. Throughout the book we also listen to the views and advices of interviewed experts from academia as well as business practice on how to drive service productivity.

A forecast on how service productivity and service innovation might evolve in the future provides us - and hopefully you as a reader - with the necessary food for thought to develop our own understanding of driving service productivity in different business settings. Overall, this book is not a traditional "academic product" that summarises the views of a few, but a co-created offering that profited enormously from the contributions of so many.