Majid Iqbal to speak at the Value Innovation and Pricing MeetUp August 22
By Steven Forth
Thursday August 22 Majid Iqbal will be visiting Vancouver to speak at the Value Innovation and Pricing Meetup. If you are interested in services design and the emergence of new services led business models this will be a great opportunity to meet with one of the real thought leaders in the field.
Majid is the author of Thinking in Services: Encoding and Expressing Strategy Through Design. This is not a typical process or “how to” book. It looks deep into the underlying patterns behind all services. It begins by asking the obvious, but hard to answer, question “What is a service?” and goes on to explore the ways in which services can create value. Sixteen different elemental services patterns are identified, and ways in which most services are actually the combination of two patterns are explored. See a list of the 16 patterns below.
The patterns are then organized into a 4 x 4 grid that can be used to tell different stories around the service and to test to make sure that the service is complete. This 16x Frame is a great tool for those engaged in service design. It helps to organize the affordances (what the different parts of the service make possible) and the performance (how the service is delivered) from the perspectives of the Service Provider, the Agents delivering the service, the Service Customer, and the Service User.
The book goes on to look at the different strategies that can be implemented in developing and evolving services. This is very helpful for all those organisations that are looking to move their service offerings to the next level or to respond to new competition. Majid shows the role of net value to the customer and net value to the provider in shaping service design. The question of value is often overlooked in standard service design processes. At Ibbaka, we advocate layering value and price into customer journey maps (one of the standard tools of services design).
Why is this important to Ibbaka and our customers?
Services are playing a larger and larger role in how value is created and delivered
More and more companies are delivering technology innovation through services
Pricing bundled offers that include product, services and data is a core challenge for many of our customers
Services design and delivery require new skills and competencies
There is an emerging model of service led growth that provides an alternative path to that of product led growth
The frameworks and patterns included in Thinking in Services are proving to be very helpful in our work where we uncover value, use this to segment markets and choose targets, and then to design pricing models and processes.
Part of our work at Ibbaka involves discovering and applying design patterns. A current project includes the identification of the different patterns that can be found in value creation and monetization through data. We ask questions about how access, analysis and distribution of data creates value and how that can and should be priced. We are working on a pattern language (see Christopher Alexander) for pricing, beginning with data pricing. We suspect that a pattern language of some form will be critical to the move to Machine to Machine (M2M) pricing that we are expecting over the next decade. Majid’s work is one of the key inputs into our thinking on this.
Majid also has some interesting ideas on the role of customer experience in value and pricing. This is something that is critical to several of our customers and we will share some thoughts on his OPEN pricing model in a future post.
Outcomes - Price/Experience = Net Value
The Sixteen Services Patterns
To whet your interest for the Thursday August 22 session, there are eight services patterns identified in the book.
Pattern 1: Examine - Evaluate
Pattern 2: Maintain - Protect
Pattern 3: Restore - Repair
Pattern 4: Transform - Translate
Pattern 5: Conduct - Connect
Pattern 6: Contain - Hold
Pattern 7: Lease - Rent
Pattern 8: Display - Dispense
Remember, most services will combine two of these patterns.
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