Risk management and service business development

Designing attractive and efficient service concepts is a prerequisite of business success. The development of business through service excellence is one way of surviving the competition while increasing service quality and the related customer loyalty. Managing risks is an essential part of service business management. Risks related to, e.g., quality of services, service cost-effectiveness, available resources for service development, and service contracts, need to be taken into account. The traditional emphasis in risk management has focused on protecting the system and its users from the failures in the system. When considering the performance of a system in its larger commercial and political environment, uncertainty may provide opportunities as well as threats. Therefore, it is important that risk management take into consideration both of these aspects of uncertainty. The key research question of this paper is how to develop new service business and at the same time take into account both threats and opportunities related to the new services.