26 out of Forbes’ 100 “World's Most Innovative Companies” are service businesses. 

Service innovation sometimes isn’t visible. B2B companies, enabled by artificial intelligence and analytics, deliver cutting edge service by better understanding their customers, operations, and marketing.

Here are 5 visible examples of service innovation.​

“I can’t believe how they didn’t see this coming”, my colleague argued. “They should’ve just gotten rid of all the on-premise stuff and moved to VoIP completely.” 

We had been asked to come up with a turnaround concept for a telco equipment manufacturer who struggled with the disruptive forces caused by a technology shift towards VoIP technology. Our client was trying to move into VoIP equipment but was facing serious strategic challenges along the way.

This telco equipment company was in a situation I call the disruption-alienation trap. 

Companies in a disruption-alienation trap know they are being disrupted - but they face a trade-off between countering the disruption and causing internal and external alienation.

In this case study, we analyzed McKinsey’s social media strategy to answer one fundamental question: How should companies in industries built on confidentiality and reputation market on social media?

In the book “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”, Jeff Sutherland describes the advantages of the Scrum project management philosophy. 

Having been part of project teams and managing projects or project modules in consulting, I immediately started to contrast the principles and ideas of scrum with the traditional project management approach I had seen so many times in consulting.

The fundamental differences between the waterfall as a traditional project management approach and the scrum method lie in their top down vs. bottom up approaches to fundamental project management. 

While the waterfall method tries to fit work to the project schedule, e.g., by allocating more resources to overcome roadblocks to catch up with the schedule, the scrum method adapts the project schedule to contingencies and tries to not overwhelm resources in case of obstacles.

For decades, Procter & Gamble has internally used a format called the “One-Pager Memo”. Over the last months, the one-pager format has helped me out many times - sometimes in very surprising ways.

My professor at UC Berkeley, former P&G Marketing Director Bill Pearce, introduced me to the one-pager memo format in one of my MBA classes.

Each week, Bill made us write a different product development concept using the one-pager structure. To me, this sometimes ended in long nights tweaking my writing over and over again to make both the idea and its communication work.

You can find a great explanation of the format and how it works in this blog post by Vandwerk. It basically follows this structure:

If you’re an entrepreneur, MBA student, consultant, or apply for a job - you’ve probably been in a situation where someone asked you to “go and understand that business model”. 

Easier said than done. But don’t worry, I’m here to provide you with a method that has helped me in the past. I call this method the “cash-in cash-out business model analysis”.

During my MBA at Berkeley-Haas we analyzed and designed business models a lot. One of the popular tools used in these exercises is the Business Model Canvas.

While Google Trends shows an ever growing interest in “customer experience”, “user experience”, and the “customer journey”, these topics are yet underrepresented in the strategic thinking and organizational structure of most companies. This is surprising as customer experience encompasses all touchpoints with a company’s customer for both products and services along the full product life cycle.

Instead of thinking about customer experience in a holistic, strategic way, the responsibility for customer experience is often fragmented between product, marketing, sales, and other departments. Lately, the introduction of the CXO, “the officer responsible for the overall user experience (UX) of an organization [...] for curating and maintaining a holistic user-, business-, and technology-appropriate experience”, has brought attention to the lack of C-level attention to customer experience. 

Customer experience impacts three major strategic aspects of a company: the product and brand, the required capabilities, and, ultimately, the competitive advantage.

The Forbes article “This Little Service Absolutely Crushes Google Alerts” analyzes IFTTT, a service that allows to “put the internet to work for you”. Users can define rules about what happens if a change on a website or device occurs.

Author Gene Marks, a Forbes Contributor focusing on "technologies helping companies" analyzes that "[IFTTT] absolutely crushes Google Alerts". Describing IFTTT as a “workflow system in the cloud” the article argues that this technology outperforms the functionality offered by Google Alerts. 

Google describes Alerts as a product to “monitor the web for interesting new content”. However, a closer analysis brings to light one major difference between both tools: they address different user needs.

Rumors are Nintendo might be bringing its games to the Android operating system. The Business Insider article “Nintendo might be using Android to power its next games console” talks about how Nintendo might change its strategy into a new, hybrid business model.

Nintendo might be forced to experiment with its business model after it wasn’t able to replicate the success of its Wii in recent years. Whereas the Wii sold 70 million units, its successor Wii U reached only a little more than 10% of this result.

While Apple and Google may pursue different strategies they compete about the most important driver of their business - the user. Last week, Apple announced a major strategic change that many might have overlooked among all the product updates.

It makes sense that both Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) try to control and add value to the user experience on their respective operating systems. Therefore, both have focused on the most important needs of their users and provided apps address these needs.

However, while Google has also made 13 major apps available on iOS - while Apple has historically provided zero Android apps!

With the release of Apple Music this will change. For the first time ever, Apple will build an app for Android. This is a big change in Apple’s strategy. 

Apple also announced the release of “Move to iOS”, an app to wirelessly migrate user data from Android to iOS. It’s obvious that this move intensifies the competition for users between iOS and Android.