Supporting service innovation through a value development framework

Services have become a vital catalyst for economic growth worldwide. From a business perspective, innovation in services is regarded as being a key pillar in order to sustain the growth momentum of the service sector. The capability to create innovative services constitutes a complex problem for service providers. A major problem identified through a review of the literature concerns the lack of a service innovation framework that puts emphasis on the development of customer value or value being proposed by a service to customers. This paper presents a value development framework, called ServiceMIF, which can contribute to creating service innovation opportunities during service development through the creation of new or improved customer value. Ongoing preliminary trial results show that ServiceMIF can effectively help businesses to propose new or improved customer value while enhancing the quality of their service offerings.