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Smart Services

Mission of the Expert Group:

We provide a platform to share best practice to support the development and commercialization of smart services that are enabled by the use of data.

Smart service focus on the design of new innovative services in both a range of industries, from pure services such as banking to services associated with
products or capital goods in both the B2B and B2C segments. We often focus on understanding the challenges of the ecosystem, the actors, their roles and their individual tasks. From this, we work to find new innovative value propositions and design new business models to support value creation within the ecosystem.
Data can be transformed into information to assist with the development of new services as well as during the delivery of services.
Our partners and members benefit from getting access to this knowledge and experience through a structured innovation process that guides them from the initial challenge to a project proposal to apply for Innosuisse support.

We differentiate between two application scenarios with strong methodological synergies between them:

1. Industrial smart services for business users, typically in production environments

  • Applying the concept of servitization of manufacturing in specific production environments
  • Leveraging the potentials of product-service transformation for increasing customer value and gaining competitive advantages
  • Creating business service ecosystems

2. Services for human individuals, typically consumers

  • Gaining insights into jobs, hidden pains and gains related to a service
  • Modelling the customer journey and developing appropriate value propositions
  • Finding the appropriate equilibrium between the digital and the human side of data-driven services

What do our Industrial Members get from this Expert Group?

  • Getting to know best practice approaches for smart services from other companies
  • Becoming familiar with innovative concepts for smart services from R&D
  • Discovering the potential of data science to design advanced smart services.
  • Sharing experiences with other companies
  • Benefitting from networking opportunities with experts and like-minded companies
  • Getting access to innovative R&D projects from the smart services science community
  • Having the opportunity to participate in student projects

We bring these benefits to the members of the Expert Group using different formats such as co-creation in workshops, lunch-seminars, extended conferences and direct bilateral exchanges.

Academic leader: Jürg Meierhofer, Zürich University of Applied Sciences,  juerg.meierhofer@zhaw.ch

Industrial leader: Gerrit Schatte, Kistler, gerrit.schatte@kistler.com

Events

No event found!

Projects

Various Innosuisse projects on digital twins and smart service ecosystems:
Digital twin-based services to support decision making along the product life-cycle of capital equipment and in service ecosystems.
With numerous partners from industry and academia

A range of international projects on data-driven services: For example, Interreg projects “Data Sharing Framework” (https://www.data-sharing-framework.eu/).

Many contributions to the databooster topic “Smart Services” (https://databooster.ch/focus-topics/)

Smart Services Summit

Data innovation alliance held in Zurich its fifth Smart Services Summit at Swisscom’s new workspace in Zurich. We had more than 40 attendees at the summit; a good mix from industry and universities. The summit was jointly supported by the ASAP Service Management Forum (Italy). 

To get an insight, check out the resulting Springer proceedings of the edition 2021: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-97042-0_7

Service Lunches and Expert Group Workshops

21.01.2024: Noah Gunzinger: MYBLUEPLANET Climate Actions App

Past Service Lunches

The successful series of service lunches started late 2017. The format comprises a smart service case presentation by a company during a brown bag lunch and is always accompanied by intense and deeply grounded expert discussions.

  • 29.09.2023: Sebastien Domaschke and Christof Niemann-Mall: Data Driven Innovation
  • 23.05.2023: Nikolas Schaal, The digital ship
  • 21.10.2022: Smart Services Summit
  • 27.09.2022: Shaun West, Contracts for Advanced Services
  • 28.06.2022: Marc Schaad, Philipp Schenkel, and Thomas Wuhrmann: Showcase Kistler & Digitalization (Link to the blog)
  • 28.03.2022: Boris Ricken, Transformation des Servicegeschäftes von Schweizer Industriefirmen
  • 30.09.2021: Linus Schaaf, 10X-Service Design Lab – An accelerator for business development
  • 28.06.2021: Benjamin Wiederkehr, Managing Director, Interactive Things: Visualizing Swiss Open Government Data
  • 04.05.2021: Klaus Salmhofer, Director Order Processing & Global Service, Essemtec AG: How an integrated product configurator in sales changed the whole quality of projects sold to customers
  • 16.03.2021: Marco Zgraggen, Geschäftsführer, Sisag AG, Daniel Pfiffner, Geschäftsführer, ProSim GmbH: Pollux  – Digital Alpine Twin
  • 04.02.2021: Nikola Pascher, Kistler: The Kistler Innovation Lab as a powerful Digitization Booster
  • 22.09.2020: Fabian Oliver, KWe Consulting: Transformation Journey to Smart Products
  • 10.06.2020: Matthew Andersen, Sulzer: Industrial IoT for the real world.
  • 18.03.2020: Christian Messerli, Daniel Kölsch, SAP: Is standard software and innovation a contradiction?
  • 13.11.2019: Kevin Smith, Contovista: The Human Factor: Making the Most of AI Results
  • 12.09.2019: Paolo Mauri, Electrolux: How IoT is Changing the Electrolux Service
  • 16.09.2019: Roger Krähenbühl, SBB and Fabian Fluri, Zühlke: Es hat noch Platz!
  • 16.01.2019: Matthias Hohler, Swisscom and Alex Geiger, Zimmer Biomet: Innovating Healthcare through Mobile Data and Predictive Analytics
  • 18.10.2018: François Rüf, Bank Vontobel: Towards a Data Driven Company
  • 27.06.2018: Christopher Ganz, ABB: Digital Twin – Challenges & Concepts
  • 10.04.2018: Falko Eichen, Bruhn + Partner and Adrienne Schäfer, HSLU: Servicetransformation realisieren mit Hilfe einer praxisorientierten Toolbox
  • 19.01.2018: Thomas Husmann, Previon Plus: Von der Vision zur Online-Matching-Plattform
  • 25.09.2018: Mario Herger / The Silicon Valley Mindset: Wie Data-driven Innovation unsere Welt auf den Kopf stellt

Smart Service Cases

The following ebooks encompass the short papers describing the case studies conducted by small groups of students during the CAS (certificate of advanced studies) Smart Service Engineering (Data Product Design) and the course module “Service Engineering” in the “MAS Wirtschftsingenieurwesen” at ZHAW School of Engineering. 
The ambition of the courses is to convey the systematic methods of service design and engineering to the participants in a directly applied way in three days. To do so, the classes are split in small working groups at the very start of the course. The groups choose users with a real-world challenge which they want to support by design a new data-driven service during the entire evolution of the course. The case studies are continuously developed across the course.


Download eBook CAS Smart Service Engineering
Download eBook Module Service Engineering MAS Wirtschaftsingenieur