UdZ 01.21

FOCUS – BEST PRACTICES 14 / UdZ 2-2021 “ The future is a service, services are the future. Services, continuously enhanced by the digital transformation, are both, a driver for margin and for sustainability, by getting the most out of products and processes. Lennard Holst, FIR e. V. an der RWTH Aachen ” 4 Böhmann et al. 2020, p. 33 5 The study can be found at the following link : publikationen.fir.de 6 Böhmann et al. 2020, p. 30 Particularly when it comes to complex service concepts of this kind, Germany’s widely lamented false start into the dig- ital age could prove fatal. In terms of the importance of the tertiary sector for the volume of value added, the German economy is already mediocre at best on an international level. With a 69 percent share of value added and a 74 percent share of the number of employees, the sector clearly accounts for the lion’s share of economic output. 2 This puts Germany in the middle of the pack in Europe, behind countries such as the UK, France, and Sweden. Globally, however, the service sector is growing much faster than in Germany, where annual output growth over the past ten years has been at an anemic pace of just one percentage point, far behind international competitors from Asia and North America. According to a study by the Western Union Company , the volume of trad- ed services worldwide will increase by 31 percent between 2019 and 2025 (from 6.1 to 8.0 trillion U.S. dollars), which means that the service sector will once again gain consid- erably in importance. 3 The ability to design digital services, especially by integrating innovative technologies in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) or the Internet of Things (IoT), will thus become a crucial capability for maintaining Germany’s competitiveness as a business location. Looking at the current state of development of the service sector in Germany, it becomes clear that without significant efforts, Europe’s largest economy will fall behind in terms of economic performance in international comparison. So what needs to be done to ensure that the false start in digitaliza- tion is not repeated here? Germany 2030 – a Services Powerhouse? T he relatively young discipline of services research is striving to provide a systematic answer to this question. The research project “Digital Services as a Success Factor for Future Value Creation – DL2030,” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is currently attracting attention in this context. The project seeks to “identify research and development needs, including suitable approaches, that contribute to the design of innovative technology-oriented service systems with high customer value – with the aim of paving the way for the future competitiveness of the German economy.” 4 The approach used in a study published as part of the “DL2030” project 5 is original in that it does not provide an analysis of technical or organizational perspectives only. Instead, it focuses equally on people as users in the design of innovative service systems. In the study, leading service researchers present development paths, research fields, and recommendations for future research as opportunities for science to contribute to mapping out a path for the successful transformation of the economy and society and to preparing them for the “value creation world” of the future. The authors of the study outline a vision for the service society in Germany in 2030. In this vision, businesses and public bodies have a sufficient knowledge base not only to master end-to-end digitized value creation, but also to make it internationally competitive. This includes, for example, the ability to tailor or adapt services for customers in real time and to develop and implement responsive, innovative solutions. Companies are able 6 to generate value creation on the basis of highly flexible software and intelligently processed data and to develop competencies in digital ecosystems with which to successfully scale this value creation processes for the international market. The prerequisite for this is that the companies themselves can rely on the integration of reliable digital services.