Abstract
With service industries dominating industrial economies, and much talk of the servicisation of manufacturing, it is evident that the future of services is a topic of relevance right across the economy. Yet policy and management thought has note really moved on from the assumption that manufacturing and goods are the foundation of economic life. The new “normal”, however, features intangible as well as tangible products; there is often a blurring of supposed boundaries between product and process, production and consumption; even producer and consumer may be less clearly demarcated, with many services coproduced by their consumers. While organisational strategies and technological opportunities mean that many service activities are being industrialised, there are still many complex features of these activities that challenge accepted wisdom; and many manufacturing firms are acquiring some elements of these features, too. The futures will see yet further intertwining of tangible and intangible products and their production processes, and the design of service systems will become of increasing importance. This is relevant, not least, because many of the responses to the Grand Challenges that confront our world will require re-engineering of service systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Data from Teichgraber (2013).
- 2.
For a study using survey data to explore the trends, see Dachs et al. (2012).
- 3.
So services produce services—which gives more room for confusion than saying, for example, that manufacturers produce goods.
- 4.
In this essay we will, with some reluctance, use the term “customer” most frequently. The term is often contentious—professional services may involve “clients”, health services “patients”, transport services “passengers”, and so on—and it can be misleading in that the recipient of the service need not, furthermore be the person or organisation that is the paying customer for it; and some services (e.g. prison services) are changing the circumstances of certain individuals in order to obtain social outcomes for others.
- 5.
- 6.
There may be some justification in the growing juxtaposition of the “real economy” and those financial services that seem to be dealing with layer upon layer of abstract financial products.
- 7.
See Miles (1993) for an extensive list of features that characterise service activities and products to greater or lesser extents. In that paper the point is made that just about any effort to generalise about characteristics of services will meet with many exceptions. This could be labelled Miles’ First Law of Services.
- 8.
Though goods may be assembled from components and/or customised, for example in bicycle shops, and tailors.
- 9.
Evangelista and Savona (1998) and Hipp et al. (2000) found many service firms reporting standardised outputs, in their surveys; conflicting results are, however, reported by Sundbo (2002) and Hortelano and Gongález-Moreno (2007). These differences may reflect variations across countries, time periods, or survey methods.
- 10.
For a rare treatment of the beneficial possibilities of such arrangements—with citations to more negative accounts—see Gould (2010).
- 11.
Though there might be many units produced for that customer—e.g. many mobile phones produced with specific logos on them and software in them, for a particular network operator.
- 12.
Barras (1990) and earlier studies on the “reverse product cycle” where he argued that IT should be seen as the basis for an industrial revolution in services).
- 13.
For one of the most important lines of development here—personal health systems—see Pombo-Juárez et al. (2014). New IT is also being used in many other applications, such as robotic surgery, screening the genetic structure of diseases and patients, and 3-D imaging (as in the case of my new tooth!).
- 14.
E.g. driverless vehicles; these have long been familiar in some rail services and warehouses, but are a novelty in other settings.
- 15.
See Government Office for Science (2011) for a forward-looking study of this topic.
- 16.
- 17.
Reviews of the effectiveness of CBT can be found at, for example, http://summaries.cochrane.org/search/site/cognitive%20behavioural%20therapy. As might have been predicted, IT is being brought into play here, too, with computerised CBT being rolled out.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
For discussions and practical experience in the emerging fields of service design, see the websites of the service design network (http://www.service-design-network.org/) and the service design research network (http://www.servicedesignresearch.com). The journal Touchpoint focuses on this area.
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Acknowledgement
The article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of the subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Programme.
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Miles, I. (2016). The Future of Services. In: Gokhberg, L., Meissner, D., Sokolov, A. (eds) Deploying Foresight for Policy and Strategy Makers. Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25628-3_14
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