About Exser

Exser, center for service innovation

Exser is the Dutch center for service innovation, a joint initiative of several innovative service providers and Almere Kennisstad. It was officially opened at 18 December 2008. The national government, the municipality of Almere and the province of Flevoland supported the initiative with a start-up grant of € 4 million. The parties involved have asked Exser to reinforce the innovative growth of Dutch service providers in a bid to enhance the competitive strength of the Netherlands. Existing innovation programs focus primarily on the development of new technologies for the benefit of the production industry, usually with a focus on the use of the new technologies involved, which is remarkable because it is often other factors, like the market, customer interaction, the new business model and the adjustment of organizations that determine the success or failure of an innovation. Exser is the center for service innovation that focuses on the development and provision of knowledge and experience involving the ‘soft’ and management-related elements of innovation. Exser wants to promote a culture for excellent service innovations, allowing service providers and government to benefit from service-oriented research and education in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is a service economy

The service sector in the Netherlands represents over 70% of the country’s GDP and over 80% of its employment. In the last five years, new jobs have almost exclusively been provided by the service sector. With regard to future economic growth, improving the innovativeness and productivity in the service sector is crucially important, all the more so because domestic markets have been opened up to foreign competitors. Domestic markets increasingly face competition from abroad. The arrival of global service providers (including in from emerging markets like India and China), the increased mobility of labor and capital, deregulation (EU Service Directive, GATTS) and increasing possibilities to export/import service play a role in this development. The Netherlands have a good starting position in the competitive international service arena. The country has a number of characteristic service specializations like publishing and media, the creative industry, financial services (with the important pensions and insurance markets), ICT services, engineering services, retailing and transport & logistics. ExSer supports Dutch companies that want to expand the services within an international context.

What are services?

For decades, scientists have emphasized the intangibility of services, the interaction between service providers and their customers, the problem of providing services from stock and determining the quality of services in advance. Recent research shows, however, that the difference between industrial companies and service providers are much smaller than we thought. Service provisioning plays a role in virtually all economic activities. Industrial companies rarely manufacture only their products and an overwhelming majority also provides some kind of service. In other words, there is a continuum, at one end of which we find industrial companies that provide some level of service, and on the other end there are companies that only provide intangible services. It is useful to draw a distinction between pure services (an advice), various kinds of service functionalities that surround an industrial product and – to use a more old-fashioned term – services being rendered.

What does Exser do?

Exser is a center for service innovation in which businesses, scientists and government work together to strengthen and accelerate innovation management and service innovations. The goal is to share knowledge and experience. When there are shared needs, the parties involved will develop initiatives for joint R&D programs designed to fill the gaps. Within Exser, the collaboration is given shape in the following:

1.        Exser creates a Community of Practice with experts who focus on innovation management in services. Here, the emphasis is on how. Within a secure environment, the parties involved exchange best practices, knowledge and expertise on how to realize service innovation in a systematic and professional way. Cross-fertilization and mutual learning are key concepts within this activity.

2.        Exser creates and provides state-of-the-art knowledge regarding innovation themes that are shared by service providers from various sectors. Based on questions from these various sectors, cross-sector service themes are identified that are then worked out in R&D programs. Individual service providers use the results to increase their own innovative potential and thus realize a competitive service offering.

3.        Exser offers a contribution to the multidisciplinary teaching and training of current and future generations of professionals with responsibilities for the design, development and realization of new services. This requires new teaching and training programs at higher educational, university and post-graduate levels that will match the needs of service providers.

Public-private collaboration in the area of service innovation is a new phenomenon that complements the existing knowledge infrastructure in the Netherlands. In the first phase, Exser provides a platform for the exchange of experiences between service providers from various sectors. This will allow companies to benefit from the exchange of best practices in the short term. In this way, Exser is building a powerful network for service innovation in the Netherlands. In the start-up phase, insight will also become available with regard to the major challenges in years to come. Business experts and scientific researchers will together develop a research agenda for service innovations. Together with higher education and university partners, Exser wants to carry out demand-driven research activities.

Exser and Almere

The Exser program has been commissioned by Almere Kennisstad and a number of major innovative companies from the Dutch service sector. It is located in Almere, the heart of the Dutch service economy in the north of the Randstad region. In this co-called North Wing, there is a large diversity of economic activities, including international financial services and headquarters, transport, logistics and related knowledge-intensive services, industry, creative industry, ICT and multimedia, life sciences and a medical cluster. Almere is the first urban center in the Netherlands where all homes are connected to a very fast (fiber optics) communication network, which makes the city a front runner both in the Netherlands as well as on the European stage. At the request of the business community and Almere Kennisstad, Exser is being run by a project team led by fellow initiator and quartermaster Prof. Dr. ir. Bart Nieuwenhuis, consultant and professor at Twente University of Technology.

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