For a long time, although people enjoy a variety of services everywhere, they don’t know what the service is; despite the added value created by service industry in the world occupies more than 60% of GDP, the service sector however still is considered as "subsidiary department or the catalyst" for the development of the primary and secondary industry. This is mainly because of the lack of study on service essence, and thinking that the service is not the technology, or service industry has not "the core technology".

It’s time to have a fresh understanding of the essence of "service" now. In the traditional sense, the process which provides intangible "products", such as labor, intelligence and etc. is known as service.

In fact, service is "the process" to meet the needs of the service acceptors through necessary means and approach. Namely service is a process that service providers satisfy the service beneficiary by providing any necessary means and methods.

In this definition, what is called necessary means and approach, not only through direct contact, but also through indirect contact; not only immaterial means and methods, such as labor or physical strength, wisdom, knowledge and soft technology’s means (for instance consulting or advice, organizing, management, mediation and arbitration, etc.), but also material means, namely all indispensable natural things and artificial products such as goods, tangible tools, machine, equipment and etc., but do not include the manufacture of the latter. Of course, these material means mentioned above must be adopted through non-material means and methods in order to meet the demands of service acceptors.

The requirements of service acceptors include: to obtain tangible tools and means (including goods, equipment, machine or others) which they (organization, enterprise, etc.) needed to solve the problem; to acquire intangible tools and means (experience, intelligence, knowledge, information or other capabilities) needed to solve the problem; to obtain directly assistance or care they need; Let them feel convenient, comfortable, happy and contented. The former two will help service acceptors acquire the abilities to solve problems independently; the two latter, service providers will directly solve the problems for those service beneficiary. It is noteworthy that tangible tools and means needed to solve the problem are to serve the intangible tools, as well as serve to satisfy other demands actually. In short, the requirements of the service acceptors include material requisite, spirit and feeling demand as well as enhancement capacity, etc.

To sum up, the tenet of service in a broad sense is to meet the requirements of service acceptoes, therefore it includes not only the process to provide tangible and intangible "products", but also the process to provide the products formed by integrating hard technology and soft technology.
According to the new understanding of the broad sense technology, process technology belongs to the category of soft technology. Of course, the means and methods which meet the need of service acceptors include not only hard and soft technologies themselves, even include in natural thing and artificial manufactured goods. Therefore, service is a special soft technology, is a technology of technology. In other words, the essence of service is a soft technology which serves to meet human material requisites, mental and psychological demands, and enhance problem-solving abilities, it’s a process technology.

It’s meaningful to clarity service’s attributes from the soft technology perspective. The backwardness of service industry is directly related to the backward notion of service. In the past, few people regards the methods and process of service as technology, and most of people consider service as non-technical factor and "subsidiary department or the catalyst" for the development of the primary and secondary industry."

To study the methods and process of service as soft technology is not only conducive to lucubrate on essence of service and service innovation, but also many new issues in service economy, including the standard of service’s approach and intellectual property issues, can be theoretically explained. Furthermore, the service industry and manufacturing increasingly penetrated mutually and difficult to make a clear distinction. It’s the inevitable result of integrating hard technology and soft technology in the process of providing services to hard technology innovation & its industrial innovation by soft technology, or in the process which soft-tech industry enhance its intellectual contents by using the achievements of modern hard technology.

Also, the concept of service innovation system can be build according to the innovation framework in a broad sense, and study and solve systematically the environmental problems of encouraging service innovation, such as policies, standards, laws, intellectual property including patents of business method in the service sector, and further promote service innovation.

Source: Zhouying JIN, Jiancui《New trend of service industry and service innovetion》, Journal of China City Study, Initial Issue，2003.10