Professional services | EPFL Graph Search

Professional services are occupations in the service sector requiring special training in liberal arts and pure sciences education or professional development education. Some professional services, such as architects, accountants, engineers, doctors, and lawyers require the practitioner to hold professional degrees or licenses and possess specific skills. Other professional services involve providing specialist business support to businesses of all sizes and in all sectors; this can include tax advice, supporting a company with accounting, IT services, public relations services or providing management services. Many industry groups have been used for academic research, while looking at professional services firms, making a clear definition hard to attain. Some work has been directed at better defining professional service firms (PSF). In particular, Von Nordenflycht generated a taxonomy of professional service firms, defining four types: Classic PSFs (e.g. law and accounting firms): characterized by a high knowledge intensity, a professionalized workforce, and low capital intensity Professional campuses (e.g. hospitals): characterized by high knowledge intensity, a professionalized workforce, and high capital intensity Neo-PSFs (e.g. management consultants): characterized by high knowledge intensity and a low capital intensity Technology developers (e.g. R&D firms, biotechs): characterized by high knowledge intensity and a high capital intensity Frameworks such as this aid the ability of managers and academics to better understand how such firms manage themselves and how to judge benchmark practices. There is no definitive list of occupations in professional services, but examples include the following: Accountant Actuary Appraiser Architect Consultant Evaluator Engineer Financial planner Geoscientist Investment manager IT consultant Inspector Lawyer Management consultant Marketing Public Relations Physician Supply Chain Management Training and development Urban Planner Veterinary physician Professional services can be provided by sole proprietors, partnerships or corporations.

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

The service sector is the most dominant sector in every developed economy today. The ability to develop and successfully launch new services is crucial for service organizations to stay competitive and to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. However, up until now, a mismatch remains between the importance of service innovation for society and the attention given to it in both academia and practice. Existing research has compared the innovative output of service firms with manufacturing firms and found that the difference is one of degree rather than of substance. Studies which focus on the process instead of the output of service innovation, however, are still relatively scarce. This dissertation aims to help close this research gap by examining three service innovation processes in different contexts. First, it offers a theoretical illumination of service innovation with the help of knowledge creation theory. This is beneficial for defining service innovation more precisely. The second study is concerned with the influence of emotional factors on the development of dynamic capabilities in new ventures. It shows that young ventures which are able to deliberately switch between emotional and analytical modes of operation have a higher likelihood of success. The study compares the development of two service-oriented ventures with two product-oriented ones that are part of an accelerator program at the School of Design Thinking at Stanford University. The third paper is concerned with product-service strategies, or Servitization, and the relation to vertical integration and the coordination of innovation in downstream markets. The study shows that the Servitization development, i.e. the vertical integration of manufacturing firms into its users' operation, is a response to the failure of architectural innovation in more flexible buyer-supplier relationships. The study finds four different strategies for the service business of manufacturing firms based on case studies in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical industries. Overall, I am able to show that firms need to be able to build three distinct capabilities to master their service innovation efforts. First, they need to build up a capacity for innovation to gain economies from partial repetition of solutions. Second, firms need to have skills in place to create and manage boundary objects, especially at the client interface. Finally, they need to have capabilities to build up complementarities which help protect revenues from their service innovation initiatives.

EPFL2015

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

EPFL2015