Bartending and mixology made a quantum leap forward when the world’s first bionic bar was launched on a cruise ship earlier this month. Are you ready to start ordering your drinks from your phone and have them delivered by a robot, or are you an old-fashioned fan?
A bionic bar is a great example of how new products are introduced within a system of related products. First you have a robot capable of blending drinks. Second there is the use of the smartphones as the user interface for ordering classics or a mix of your own choice. Third a real-time scoreboard showing statistics for what is popular today. The three of them together represent a system innovation.
The two robot bartender arms are capable of serving a new drink every 30 seconds, or up to 1 000 in a day. This is on par with a great bartender.. With 30+21 different ingredients available in the library of ingredients, an exceptionally high level of customization can be offered to the customer. This can be used to offer a very broad spectrum of predefined options, or to enable co-creation with customers of completely new creations. It all starts with an order from an app on your phone and ends on the scoreboard over the most popular drinks.
With bionics entering the service sector, we are starting to see new capabilities with which human capabilities are complemented by robots for repetitive tasks. . Bionics can be trained to offer a broad spectrum of base options and mass-customization while maintaining or increasing the economies of scale.
My predictions for the future of bionics in the service industry are:
- We are still in early stage of innovations and the segments of the services sectors where they will make the most sense remain to be seen.
- The recipe for success is likely based on a combination of the three ingredients above. Order and pay through phone, partial service delivery with a bionic and a public scoreboard.
- A hybrid human/bionic model, where the human touch is a vital part of the complete offering will remain a key ingredient in the delivery.
- The role of the scoreboard in monitoring customer preferences in real-time is instrumental in adjusting supply towards what is hot and away from what is not.
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