While innovations in the manufacturing industry are comparatively well researched, the process of service innovations is more difficult to understand and organise. In principle, however, the professionalism of the development process determines the quality of the result. In other words, a professional development process (service engineering) should ensure that the product or service innovations fulfil the previously defined requirements from the supplier and customer perspective.

The IZT - Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment has developed a workshop concept to support Deutsche Telekom in the development of customer-orientated and future-proof solutions. The approach was successfully trialled and documented as part of an in-house workshop.

It was the aim of the project,

  • reduce the risk of innovation risks in a dynamic and complex environment with high expectations,
  • placing the user's perspective at the centre of product design from the outset,
  • open up synergy potential in the design of products and services,
  • to choose methodical approaches that also enable a company-internal workshop to look beyond the "famous box" and integrate interdisciplinary views and current research results.

The IZT's approach was based on scientific findings from user, media and acceptance research as well as methods of futurology. The approach was based on the persona approach. To this end, typical users, their communication requirements and usage patterns were identified and characterised and analysed against the background of Deutsche Telekom's current portfolio. Based on this, service ideas were generated and concretised using selected creative methods.