Sponsored by Oracle
On October 21st 2022, the latest Smart Services Summit took place in the newly opened “Circle” building at Zurich airport. Back in 2020, for its first edition, the Summit brought together professionals to discuss how digitalization is a strong enabler of Smart Services while in 2021, professionals gathered to discuss how Smart Services can support firms to adapt through the COVID-19 Pandemic.
This year, the team focused on the highly impactful topic of how Smart Services and Servitisation can strongly support the adoption of sustainable solutions. Professionals from universities, industrial firms and nonprofits were selected to write research papers on the topic and to present their results and address the following questions:
- How are service quality and value impacted through digital technologies?
- How can one transform the customer (or a third party) into a service partner?
- How does collaborative work impact value co-creation?
- What is the impact of Smart Services on customer experience?
- How does the nature of the service deliver change?
- How can organisations be enabled to foster digital value co-creation?
The Summit included a diverse set of Keynote speakers including Alain Schilli from BASE Foundation, Thierry Buecheler from Oracle, Christine Bratrich from HSLU, Michael Blickenstorfer from Cropled and Markus Wenig from WinGD. Each presenter showcased their work, considering three pillars of sustainability within their research: The Social, Economic, and Environmental impacts of Smart Services on the market.
Senior Strategy Advisor at BASE Alain Schilli, shared insights on the opportunity of nature-inspired innovation for smart services. Nature can be seen as a laboratory and a database of intellectual property. Over the last 3.8 billion years the evolution has generated and tested various “business” models. Businesses can take advantage and embrace the transition towards a new sustainable economy generating nature-based solutions and products.
Smart services and servitization is a promising approach to fostering sustainability through the integration of new technologies with the pay-per-outcome business model. The ‘smart’ aspect of nature-inspired innovation refers to it being ‘resilient plus adaptive’. It is an approach gaining traction across areas such as for suppliers or material options, valorizing ecosystem services, and creating decentralised systems which, thanks to digitalization, are self-organising.
Connected to the work presented by Mr. Schilli, Dimitris Karamitsos, BASE’s Senior Energy Efficiency Business Development Specialist and Secretariat member of the SET Alliance, explored how Servitisation accelerates the energy transition while benefiting the economy and customers. Karamitsos discussed the results of two successful initiatives from BASE: Cooling as a Service (CaaS) and Efficiency as a Service (EaaS). The former, a project funded and supported by the Clean Cooling Collaborative focused on how Servitisation applied to cooling can support markets (including the most financially challenging) to accelerate their shift to clean and energy efficient solutions. Selected examples from KAER (a cooling services provider based in Singapore), and Energy Partners Refrigeration (a refrigeration service provider based in South Africa) illustrate the delivery of economic and customer value in respective markets, whilst driving sustainable climate impact. Within EaaS, a H2020 funded project, Mr Karamitsos shared how the model is being implemented by other technologies such as Heating and Energy Storage, to deliver holistic Smart Services to customers. The research presented by Karamitsos also showed how the model is a powerful enabler of the shift from a linear to a circular economy, which can abundantly benefit the economy, the people and the planet.
A warm thank you to Prof. Dr Shaun West and Dr. Jürg Meierhofer for organising and chairing the Summit, to Oracle for sponsoring the session, and to all the speakers, professionals and researchers present at the session who shared their valuable knowledge and experience on Smart Services. The research papers of all the speakers will be published by Springer in 2023. We look forward to the next Smart Services Summit!
