The development of innovations lead to high pressure for small and medium sized businesses, especially for those who offer industrial services. Industrial service companies are mostly B2B provider and are dependent on large firms who are the contracting authority. Therefore, the industrial service provider need to innovate their portfolio to keep pace with their customers’ demands and a rising digitization. This challenge is enhanced through less resources and innovation development departments in comparison to large firms.
This article focusses on transforming an alleged weakness into a strategic strength by presenting a collaboratively developed Design Thinking approach specialized for the needs of industrial service provider. Design Thinking is an interdisciplinary approach where internal and external stakeholder creatively develop prototypes for a corporate implementation. However, the original version of Design Thinking focuses on products rather than industrial services, which requires an adaptation for industrial service provider. Furthermore, a collaboration with diverse stakeholders needs to take into account an analogue as well as a digital performance, which will be discussed in this paper.
In the following sections, specific and general challenges of industrial service provider as well as Design Thinking are presented. Afterwards, an Action Design Research approach is presented and within that ten Design Thinking workshops that led to an adapted and digitized approach especially for industrial service innovation. We can reveal that Design Thinking is a suitable approach, which can structurally be adapted to the specific target group. Nonetheless, an open mindset of the collaborators is pivotal.