In a commentary, SMU President Professor Arnoud De Meyer noted that rising salary costs combined with little growth in value per worker is not sustainable over the medium to long term. He stressed the need to create more value per worker and stimulate growth, adding that there are only two ways of doing this: innovate or become more productive. Prof De Meyer offered five suggestions to achieve that. First of all, he highlighted the need to understand better what the real needs are in services. As suppliers of services, we may get stuck in old ways and forget to ask whether the ‘perfect’ service we

offer is still responding to the real needs of the customer. He pointed out that sometimes even customers themselves do not realise that there are better ways to offer a service, citing Uber as an example of a service which made him realise that he had unmet needs. His second suggestion was to get rid of the inefficiencies in delivery of services, citing the last-mile delivery as an example. He said that the shift from sales in retail malls to online retail has created a very inefficient delivery process, and asserted that there must be better ways to organise this last-mile delivery. His third suggestion was to make serious work of keeping our elderly workers as productive as younger ones. Prof De Meyer emphasised the need to redesign the work environment to adapt it to the limitations of elderly workers, adding that limited investments in simple tools have the potential to make them a lot more productive. His fourth suggestion comes from the fact that there is so much underused capacity in places such as classrooms, carparks and sports fields. He opined that there are many instances to optimise the utilisation of spaces, adding that the bike sharing system in Taipei is one of many examples of the shared economy where services share the same physical assets. Lastly, Prof De Meyer discussed the benefits of automation. Tools that provide information support to sales, systems that enable us to simulate different scenarios of the service delivery, for instance, can indeed augment the productivity of our service operations.