Vision sharing for new service development

The integration of technologies and customer value is a key issue for technology-based companies to achieve service innovation. We are developing a methodology for service concept creation focusing on customer value exploration to address this issue. Our primary goal is to deploy our methodology (process, methods, tools, and examples) to business planning sites in our company. By taking an action research approach consisting of four steps, observation (involved in pilot projects), conceptualization, modeling, and deployment, we have clarified the basic concept of our methodology and designed a process for service concept creation: (1) sharing a vision of new services, (2) exploring customer value, and (3) creating a service concept consisting of target users (Who), customer value (What), and key technologies (How). In this paper, we discuss the issues to solve in the early stage of developing new services and illustrate our vision sharing workshop, which is characterized by the following: (1) an interaction technique for empathetic understanding through storytelling and active listening, (2) a visualization technique for sharing clarified vision, (3) a feedback technique for deep understanding. By applying the workshop to our pilot projects, we demonstrated its feasibility and effectiveness.