Last week I participated in a workshop with one of our largest customers. One of the great initiatives they undertake is to invite their most important suppliers and bring them together to leverage the collective intellect to solve their challenges.

The challenge at hand that day was to professionalize one of their new business ventures, which consisted of creating a service business around one of their main product lines. Despite the fact that it concerns highly advanced and highly costly devices, the company recognized that even those products are commoditized. Differentiation should come from services around the delivery from the product.

That triggered me. It’s no longer about the product, stupid. It’s about the service. A new area of innovation that most companies still neglect.

The insight that my customer had, was that the service could be generated to identify how they could compose an advisory service that combined the insights and the knowledge coming from the sales of other product lines into additional service around their inititial product line.

Knowledge management and thereby creating new offerings and service offerings became thereby the focus of that day.

Action for you ? Bring in your products in one room. Look feel and experience and think about the knowledge you have about the product and what would happen if you bring learnings from the one into the other. Can you add extra service around that product and does it deliver value to the customer that gives you competitive advantage?

I think you will find some solutions !!

Frank Wammes