Services Innovation in Ireland - Options for ... - Europe INNOVA

order to gain first mover advantage, to be appropriate for their circumstances. Companies in
all of the sectors reported that a much slower and systematic approach to innovation in services
was required.
Education traded service companies and organisations, for example, pointed out that validation
processes for education and training courses precluded a particularly ‘fast’ approach to new service
developments. While ensuring a high quality learning experience, this emphasis on validation and
the slow speed of the process can hamper the ability of the system to respond to external trends and
sector needs.
Similarly the case studies from the financial services sector also pointed to the important role of
the regulator in limiting the pace of change. This is by contrast to the global financial services
concentrations described in Chapter 3 and most typically represented by London where the regulator
is more likely to be seen as sympathetic and supportive of services innovation. A number of
companies, here, suggested that the Irish regulatory bodies could adopt a more dynamic approach to
innovations in financial services.
Examples of ‘faster pace’ service innovations were noted, indeed a number of companies reported
that the increasing pace of technological change meant that they were having to responds more
quickly than in the past. Other examples of ‘faster pace’ service innovation were noted in the
animation sector. Here, one company pointed out that a key feature of the sector was the ‘pitching’
of concepts to a forum of potential investors and collaborators. This was a process, by nature, that
relied on the innovative idea being in a very early stage of development.
The majority of the case studies, however, felt their approach to services innovation was split
between the systematic and incremental approaches. Systematic approaches to innovation were
described in a number of ways, for example a pipeline from identification of an initial idea or
through to service launch.
Box 7 R&D/systematic model of services innovation
Enterprise IG, an international branding/strategic consulting agency operates an innovation process
based around three principles: Focus – Ignite – Act.
The main characteristic of this approach to service innovation is a considered, and stage based
process, with in built feedback loops, including regular customer feedback. As one case study
company from the healthcare sector put it: ‘interaction with the customer is vital and much better
than locking oneself in a dark room and spending £1 million’.
Box 8 Incremental service innovation
Chorus… introduced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to solve a particular problem of high call
support costs. In doing this, however, it also paved the way for some genuine innovations in its
service offering. For example, at an internal workshop organised to plan for the introduction of the
new system, one of the participants suggested that caller ID facilities offered by telephony networks
might be integrated within the system. Based on the fact that all telephone numbers in certain
geographical areas commence with the same two digits, caller ID would allow the IVR system to
identify which area of a particular city or county calls are coming from. It would also allow breaks
in service to be communicated to callers with the corresponding ID, by routing them to a special
message explaining the reason for the service break.
46