Piloting as a platform in industrial service innovation and co-creation

Service design, configuration and customisation have proven demanding tasks for industrial companies that previously relied mostly on their technical superiority and technological R&D. In services, offerings and customer interaction largely deal with knowledge. The higher level of intangibility, abstraction and tailoring makes it more difficult to understand and communicate the content and value of the service compared with technology-based products. This paper aims to widen the understanding of the role of piloting in industrial service innovation and co-creation and present preliminary models to support the management of service development pilots in a manufacturing context. The research, conducted as an explorative case study, is still going on. Some early findings suggest that piloting is a viable method to deepen the understanding of the customer context and, especially, the non-core supporting processes, which need to be addressed to achieve smooth implementation of the new service.