Technology-potential-analysis in non-technological service companies.

The reasonable integration of technologies as well as the consideration of customer needs alike are crucial when the position of a company shall be perceived as innovative and successful. Especially low and medium technology enterprises in the service industry often struggle with technology integration as they lack knowledge and resources to carry out technology analysis and integration. The importance of technology integration in the services sector is part of many studies. However there is little to no evidence on how, for example, a service company in a non-technological industry can carry out successful technology integration. The focus of the process model for technology potential analysis used for the study and the methodology lies on low and medium technology enterprises, specifically on enterprises in the non-technological service industry. Albeit, the approach, which shows the taken steps as a procedural model, can be used by any company in order to incorporate new technologies into their products or services. The determination of customer needs and application fields for a chosen technology form an integral part of this paper. For the case study a company in the food service industry (restaurant) was selected and the technology to be investigated was the NFC-Technology. The field study portrayed in this paper is using this procedural model as guideline to evaluate the potential of the NFC technology in the food service industry. It aims to determine tangible customer needs, actual application fields for the NFC-technology in the food service industry (restaurant) and highlights the possible implementations of the findings The first part of the paper deals with a technology based analysis of NFC and its functions and an analysis of the processes and activities within the food service industry. The second part forms a customer need analysis and a matching thereof with previously analysed NFC application fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]