The Minister of Economic Affairs, Ms. Maria van der Hoeven, has rewarded Randstad with the first Dutch Service Innovation Award at an award ceremony in The Hague, The Netherlands on November 26th.

The Service Innovation Award shows that innovation plays an increasingly important role for service providers and is no longer claimed by industrial companies alone. The other nominees for the award are Pathé, Albert Heijn, Greenwheels and KLM.

The Jury Report mentions: "Randstad is a great example of the way service providers have structurally embedded innovation in their organization.

"Randstad does this by large-scale optimization of administrative processes; by developing new business concepts; by innovating together with customers (co-creation); and by stimulating an open business culture with room for bottom-up innovations."

"Although Randstad does not have an R&D department, there’s a lot of room for innovation," the report continued.

"Employees operate as independent entrepreneurs. They are stimulated to come up with improvements.

"Two departments in the company are specifically responsible for innovation: International Accounts innovates together with large clients and Business Concept Development identifies innovations in the field and implements best practices throughout the operations."

The Service Innovation Award is an initiative of Exser, the Dutch Center for Service Innovation. See www.exser.nl for more information.