Three means of evaluation to boost industrial service culture

Although industrial services are attracting increasing attention, both in industry and within the research community, many companies seem to have difficulties in achieving significant progress in their service business. The challenge has been characterised as a transition in companies' orientation from product and technology toward service and customer (see, for example, [1, 2, 3]). Adopting service-dominant logic [e.g., 4, 5] and interpreting the business transformation in a new, holistic way could serve as a stepping-stone to a renewal of practices and culture along with development of new competencies [6]. However, there is a need for theoretically grounded and practically tested approaches to supporting companies in the transformation. In particular, the industry lacks concepts and methods for creation of a personal and shared understanding of 1) why the change is needed: motives and commitment, 2) what kind of organisational change is needed, and 3) how the intended change could be supported and managed in practice. We approached the transition challenge for companies in terms of a shift from a technology- and product-oriented culture toward a more service- and customer-value-oriented culture. We have developed an assessment approach that bring new insight into overcoming the challenges, by studying them from an organisational culture perspective [7]. The approach, developed first with manufacturing companies, has been further applied in several industries, such as technical trade and ICT. The purpose of this article is to present, in brief, three distinct procedures for applying the industrial service culture and capability approach. We briefly describe the approach, then illustrate it and consider its utilisation for three specific uses: 1. as an assessment tool for use by management groups 2. as a booster of the organisational learning process 3. as a structuring framework for roundtable work and external benchmarking.