Service Innovation Blocks A classification of service innovation methods for its application in digital transformation

One overarching opportunity in the digitized economy is to develop new services at the highest efficiency in order to solve urgent problems in an entire different way. These services drive the digital transformation and the speed in innovation is crucial to take advantage of the opportunities. In order to succeed, innovation teams need orientation and guidelines when applying the vast number of existing methods for service innovation. With the methodology illustrated in the paper, we enhance the existing body of research on various fields. First, we propose a classification scheme, which encompasses the variety of methods available to innovators and we structure these methods along four higher order innovation tasks: Exploration, Evaluation, Development and Realization. We further identified specific patterns, which describe different paths through the methodology. From a practical perspective, the overall objective of this research is to increase the efficiency of the innovation process. The structure and applicability of our framework has been evaluated with several multinational organizations with innovation experts.