Service prototyping - Sustainability impact of a service innovation approach

In addition to the rather mid or long-term effects of technological innovations technical services can significantly contribute to enhance sustainability. They support the exploitation of the potential effects in industrial applications. For example, they offer analyses, optimization concepts, consulting and training in order to reduce resource or energy consumption, emissions or to enhance lifetime of technical equipment. New service business models like pay-per-use allow to achieve the same benefit with fewer goods.Service offerings like these are able to support sustainability. Hence these services have to be developed by appropriate procedures and tools. The provision of tools therefore becomes an important precondition. For this procedure, the authors propose service prototyping. Another effect achieved by service prototyping is an advanced service design with better quality. This leads to higher success rates and less failures in service operations. This means less resources or in case of onsite services even less travel activities. In this chapter the authors investigate this relationship, give an overview of service prototyping tools and rate themselves according to aspects of sustainability related to their utilization.