Services Evaluation and Improvement with Systematic Innovation Tools

Abstract In the decades, systematic innovation has been enriched of techniques that help people in continuous/disruptive product/service improvement. Products benefit from more tools than services, but even in those scientific papers and practitioner contributions are drawing a viable path. Authors gave their contribution in this field sharing an experience in logistics innovation: one interesting outcome was a method that brought personnel with average technical knowledge to solve problems with a relatively simple method derived by TRIZ and Axiomatic Design. One evidence was that people need few techniques to solve most of problems provided these were well stated, so that the work left open the following issue: “what important to invest in? Problem solving tools or problem formulation ones?” So some approach with the aim of evaluating the innovation gap of a service and formulating the problems that must solved to fill those gaps are investigated in this paper. The paper starts its analysis from the definition of a service though its intangibility, then it investigates how LESE (Laws of Engineering Systems Evolution) can be used to identify improvement paths and, eventually, it proposes a selection of Inventive Standards suitable for service improvement and innovation. The evaluator can perform an exhaustive analysis or a rough one depending on she/he is looking for quick idea of service maturity level or needs to define a complete problem solving work to assign to a project team. This contribution on systematic service innovation aims to stimulate a debate on the more promising research directions on next years’ service innovation research.