Classified as Business

Service Innovation – Learning Launch

Challenge & Selection

I am a manager for data analytics and insights in a business that provides services for store operations in

supermarkets and food retailers overall. These include temperature monitoring (food safety), energy

optimization, and sales/marketing. My team is therefore involved in the development of new services

fueled by analytics and better use of data. There are many potential issues and bottlenecks in service

innovation processes, but we are usually able to mitigate them by deep data and domain knowledge in

combination with some design-thinking activities as visualization, mind mapping, etc.

Developing a new successful service offering nonetheless also requires a lot of customer involvement and

iteration, so I have found inspiration in the learning launch approach to improve quality and ensure

relevance in our innovation process.

Application

For our first application of the learning launch, we have chosen a service offering for predictive

maintenance which came from an idea from an R&D team and went through a visualization phase. The first

step for us was to prototype a data model for testing and add a frontend.in form of a dashboard that we

could show to stakeholders in order to get feedback on the concept.

We now had a prototype and some assumptions about how it would help our customers by addressing a

need of being able to be more proactive. This could help lower service costs and energy consumption, but

we still had to validate whether we were addressing the right stakeholders (the persons that would use the

tool) and whether the concept would fulfill the need sufficiently.

Insight & Approach

To address our own confirmation bias and learn how to improve on the original ideas, we engaged with

more customers. We invited both existing and potential new customers to participate in a proof of concept

phase. The convincing argument for the customers to get involved was that we initiated it as a co-creation

phase where we offered to tailor the new service after their feedback. Hence, it was a win-win as they

would ultimately receive a service offering that is fitted for their needs and we would learn what our

customers are looking for.

The structured feedback we received led us to iterate on more of the features and helped us to understand

how our customers prefer to consume the service offering. Moving forward, this approach will be a part of

our launch designs doing service innovation.

