The PATI team attended RESER 2015 conference arranged in Copenhagen Eigtved Pakhus the 10th and 11th September. The conference included about a hundred paper presentations on services in a wide range of fields including but not limited to health care, sustainability, social innovation, retail, ICT and Real Estate.
The first day started off with a keynote from Anders Gustafsson who discussed the definition of service innovation. Discussed in a multitude of research contexts, the definition of service innovation is still somewhat blurred which makes the discussion around the subject slightly fuzzy and difficult to relate to. This reflects the issues in collaborating across sectors and integrating services in practice between different service providers.
The first day started off with a keynote from Anders Gustafsson who discussed the definition of service innovation. Discussed in a multitude of research contexts, the definition of service innovation is still somewhat blurred which makes the discussion around the subject slightly fuzzy and difficult to relate to. This reflects the issues in collaborating across sectors and integrating services in practice between different service providers.
However, Anders approached service innovation through five lenses that are all founded on behavioral innovation: Business model, Experience, Process, Brand and Social innovation. From the service provider point of view, the business model innovation relates to financial arrangements, the experience innovation handles adding experience to the customer, brand innovation seeks to differentiate the services from the competitors and social innovation seeks to offer help for the ones in need.
In terms of monetary value, around 70 % of the GDP (https://www.quandl.com/collections/economics/services-share-of-gdp-by-country) in western societies is already service-related and still growing - shifting monetary streams from product lines towards services. To pinpoint the changes in the market, Anders gave an example of Volvo vs Minecraft where Volvo with 40 000 employees was sold for 14 million and Minecraft with 28 employees was sold for 18 million euros. Which service is more useful for everyday life, sustainability, humanity and society, can be discussed, but the example certainly makes one understand the level of transition we are in.
The greatest value for PATI of the first conference day in addition to the keynote and practical presentation experience was considered to be the industry track, where Gustafsson, Jensen, Toivanen and Hasu reflected on service insights in retail, facilities, customer experience in general and front line employees. In fact, we felt that PATI as a project is aiming to combine the approaches presented by Jensen and Toivanen – to look at the facilities management through the lenses of a customer experience. Toivanen’s notions of the task of a service provider to assist user add value in the use-context, sharing value as an issue of trust, systemic nature of service innovation, shift from individual services towards systemic solutions, and the complexities the systemic nature brings with it to solve by the service providers.
The first presentation of PATI team was given by Eelis under the heading Serving mobile workers in university campuses – access to success. The piece of research aimed to start bridging the gap between Eelis’ dissertation on dynamics of university campus management in spatial transformation and potential services that could help in taking campuses into better uses. People appeared to be interested in the pragmatic approach and the presentation triggered a couple of questions and a sort of discussion which was promising.
The second day started with a keynote by Paul Windrum from Nottingham University who talked about challenges that innovation researchers face especially in the public sector services. He focused on citizen-led innovation in a multi-agent framework and emphasized the roles of concepts such as Design thinking, Service design and the role of Designers as integrators in making processes functional. According to PATI’s interpretation all this relates to the transformation of decisive ownership over the services to be used from large corporations to individuals. We as researchers and firms as service providers need a deeper understanding on how the people interact and what they need and what is easy for them to interpret which is why the era of technical optimization is taken over by the era of human-centered usability. So technical optimization is needed but useless as such if the service is not usable.
Two PATI team members gave presentations during the second day. The morning session included Vitalija’s presentation about different scenarios for the future of Facilities management. The results from previous five research projects conducted at Aalto university about FM future in different sectors like retail, industry, knowledge workplaces, senior housing and wellness, were analysed. The results indicate that regardless of the sector and future scenario, FM service providers should consider providing more virtual services, paying attention to new ways of doing daily activities, thus new ways of supporting their customers. Also, a multi-use spaces are becoming a norm which requires less facility-oriented and more customer-centric approach. Responsibility and well-being should drive FM sector towards more balanced service package. PATI team was pleased to have Prof. P.A. Jensen himself at the auditorium listening and commenting on the presentation.
The second day was finished with the presentation by Maiju and her colleague Henna. They introduced few different ways how to measure emotions of knowledge workers: human intelligence service for reporting daily experiences at work, wearable technology ring for measuring electrodermal activity during workday and mobile self-tracking service for identifying discrete emotions and their intensity. The results of the pilot study indicated that these kind of emotion measurement tools are useful if not forced by the organisation, and value of it is realised by knowledge worker becoming more aware of own emotions and thus changing the work performance individually. Maiju’s presentation raised a lot of discussion and thoughts for further development of the paper.
All in all, the RESER 2015 conference gave PATI team a feeling that we are on the right track and understand what is going on in both service and facilities sector. Service is replacing the space but the dynamics are sensitive as the success of services is dictated by human behavior and interaction. So when managing spaces and offering spatial services, rather than just optimize and make space use more efficient, the focus needs to be in effective use of spaces and change management which can be supported by a variety of services where customers and users are focal value co-creators. The PATI team has caught the wave and is happy to continue with the research.
