Knowledge intensive services

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Knowledge-intensive services, abbreviated as KIS, are services that involve activities that are intended to result in the creation, accumulation, or dissemination of knowledge, where knowledge-intensiveness refers to how knowledge is produced and delivered with highly intellectual value-add. Knowledge intensive business services (commonly known as KIBS) are the knowledge-intensive service activities for developing a customized service or product solution to satisfy the client's needs and they are provided mainly for other companies or organizations. These concepts are continuously discussed, formulated, and developed as a part of the constantly evolving academic discipline of knowledge management.

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Knowledge-intensive services occupy a central position as an integrator of the innovation system, which by knowledge-intensive processes enables information, people, and systems to interact and where companies, research institutions, and other innovative organizations drive technological and service innovations forward for the advancement of research and development and for business and entrepreneurial purposes.

Knowledge-intensive services are a specialized part of knowledge-work and knowledge economy, where the main capital of a knowledge worker is the ability to develop and use knowledge at knowledge organizations or knowledge-intensive companies, also known as KICs. The role of knowledge-intensive services is enabled by numerous and versatile contacts with different actors at knowledge market. Knowledge-intensive services could act as an external knowledge source and contribute to innovations in client companies and introduce internal innovations and contribute to the actors’ economic performance and growth.

Knowledge-intensive service activities, abbreviated as KISA, play several important roles in innovation processes. They serve as sources of innovation by initiating and developing innovation activities in client organizations. Secondly, they serve as facilitators of innovation when they support an organization in the innovation process. Thirdly, they serve as carriers of innovation when they aid in transferring existing knowledge among or within organizations, industries, or networks so that it can be applied in a new context.

Knowledge-intensive services can be described as activities that are based on knowledge and know-how resources and are service oriented. This is a more descriptive concept than a specific industry: the information creates value for different stakeholders. Typical knowledge-intensive services activities features are, that information plays a significant role in the production of services and that the services are based on professional competence. The new knowledge is created and shared in a close interaction between the customer and the service provider. The end products are usually very innovative, intangible, and complex by their technical solutions.

Knowledge work

Knowledge work is one of the forms in knowledge-intensive services. One of the most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution is its knowledge workers and their productivity. Knowledge workers can be defined as workers, who create knowledge or use knowledge as their main resource. Knowledge work does not involve the transformation of materials into another form but transforming knowledge from one form to another.

Service thinking

Service thinking is a new theoretical philosophy for enterprise value creation. It aims to improve the customer experience and interactions by marketing and designing services. Service thinking combines different methods and tools from various disciplines. Service thinking approaches, like service logic, customer-dominant logic, service-dominant logic, and goods-dominant logic, help explain value creation.

Service design

Service design is a customer-driven approach to service development. It aims to implement the service thinking theory. Service thinking helps to innovate and improve services to make them more desirable for clients.

See also

Related Research Articles

Intellectual capital is the result of mental processes that form a set of intangible objects that can be used in economic activity and bring income to its owner (organization), covering the competencies of its people, the value relating to its relationships, and everything that is left when the employees go home, of which intellectual property (IP) is but one component. It is the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge. The term is used in academia in an attempt to account for the value of intangible assets not listed explicitly on a company's balance sheets. On a national level, intellectual capital refers to national intangible capital (NIC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disruptive innovation</span> Technological change

In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances. The concept was developed by the American academic Clayton Christensen and his collaborators beginning in 1995, and has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans generalized this term to identify disruptive science and technological advances from more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014. Their work was featured as the cover of the February 2019 issue of Nature and was selected as the Altmetric 100 most-discussed work in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business model</span> Rationale of how an organization operates

A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural or other contexts. The process of business model construction and modification is also called business model innovation and forms a part of business strategy.

In business, a competitive advantage is an attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors.

In business administration, absorptive capacity has been defined as "a firm's ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends". It is studied on individual, group, firm, and national levels. Antecedents are prior-based knowledge and communication. Studies involve a firm's innovation performance, aspiration level, and organizational learning. It has been said that in order to be innovative an organization should develop its absorptive capacity.

Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".

A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people or, more abstractly, roles. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.

Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design management</span> Field of inquiry in business

Design management is a field of inquiry that uses project management, design, strategy, and supply chain techniques to control a creative process, support a culture of creativity, and build a structure and organization for design. The objective of design management is to develop and maintain an efficient business environment in which an organization can achieve its strategic and mission goals through design. Design management is a comprehensive activity at all levels of business, from the discovery phase to the execution phase. "Simply put, design management is the business side of design. Design management encompasses the ongoing processes, business decisions, and strategies that enable innovation and create effectively-designed products, services, communications, environments, and brands that enhance our quality of life and provide organizational success." The discipline of design management overlaps with marketing management, operations management, and strategic management.

Knowledge Intensive Business Services are services and business operations heavily reliant on professional knowledge. They are mainly concerned with providing knowledge-intensive support for the business processes of other organizations. As a result, their employment structures are heavily weighted towards scientists, engineers, and other experts. It is common to distinguish between T-KIBS,, and P-KIBS, who are more traditional professional services - legal, accountancy, and many management consultancy and marketing services. These services either supply products which are themselves primary sources of information and knowledge, or use their specialist knowledge to produce services which facilitate their clients own activities. Consequently, KIBS usually have other businesses as their main clients, though the public sector and sometimes voluntary organisations can be important customers, and to some extent households will feature as consumers of, for instance, legal and accountancy services.

Co-creation, in the context of a business, refers to a product or service design process in which input from consumers plays a central role from beginning to end. Less specifically, the term is also used for any way in which a business allows consumers to submit ideas, designs or content. This way, the firm will not run out of ideas regarding the design to be created and at the same time, it will further strengthen the business relationship between the firm and its customers. Another meaning is the creation of value by ordinary people, whether for a company or not.

A service system is a configuration of technology and organizational networks designed to deliver services that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers. "Service system" is a term used in the service management, service operations, services marketing, service engineering, and service design literature. While the term frequently appears, it is rarely defined.

Service-dominant (S-D) logic, in behavioral economics, is an alternative theoretical framework for explaining value creation, through exchange, among configurations of actors. It is a dominant logic. The underlying idea of S-D logic is that humans apply their competences to benefit others and reciprocally benefit from others' applied competences through service-for-service exchange.

Service innovation is used to refer to many things. These include but not limited to:

  1. Innovation in services, in service products – new or improved service products. Often this is contrasted with “technological innovation”, though service products can have technological elements. This sense of service innovation is closely related to service design and "new service development".
  2. Innovation in service processes – new or improved ways of designing and producing services. This may include innovation in service delivery systems, though often this will be regarded instead as a service product innovation. Innovation of this sort may be technological, technique- or expertise-based, or a matter of work organization.
  3. Innovation in service firms, organizations, and industries – organizational innovations, as well as service product and process innovations, and the management of innovation processes, within service organizations.

In marketing, a company’s value proposition is the full mix of benefits or economic value which it promises to deliver to the current and future customers who will buy their products and/or services. It is part of a company's overall marketing strategy which differentiates its brand and fully positions it in the market. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, or parts thereof, or customer accounts, or products or services.

Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.

Value chain management capability refers to an organisation's capacity to manage the internationally dispersed activities and partners that are part of its value chain. It is found to consist of an international orientation, network capability, market orientation, technological capability and teamwork management capability. Value chain management capability is a higher level capability that draws together a variety of lower level capabilities.

Employee experience design is the application of experience design in order to intentionally design HR products, services, events, and organizational environments with a focus on the quality of the employee experience whilst providing relevant solutions for an organization. EED is one of the core components of Employee experience management that emphasizes understanding and fulfilling employees' experiential needs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business Model Canvas</span> Strategic management template

The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template used for developing new business models and documenting existing ones. It offers a visual chart with elements describing a firm's or product's value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances, assisting businesses to align their activities by illustrating potential trade-offs.

Clusters of Innovations (COI) have been defined in 2015 as "global economic hot spots where new technologies germinate at an astounding rate and where pools of capital, expertise, and talent foster the development of new industries and new ways of doing business."

References

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