Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era

Chapter 9. OPEN SERVICES INNOVATION IN EMERGING ECONOMIES

To this point, we have examined the importance of services in advanced economies—those characterized by high living standards, high wages, and substantial specialization of labor. As we have seen, customers benefit from the ability to reduce their total cost of searching for, receiving, and consuming products through one-stop shopping. And services companies can deliver these benefits cost-effectively by developing economies of scale in their operations through standardizing many of their processes, and incorporating more knowledge about their customers' prior experiences.

The context in emerging economies differs in important ways from that of the advanced economies: living standards ...