Design for Service Innovation and Development: A scoping study

Purpose

This paper aims to question and position Service Design’s contribution and impact into New Service Development processes and to identify knowledge gaps and research potentials to enhance Service Design integration and contribution to service innovation.

Methodology

This paper uses case study as a research strategy (Yin 1994:13). As Service Design emerges as a mature field, a multiple case study method offers a timely and systematic approach to gather data. The unit of analysis for each of the three case studies is a Service Design project chosen by the agency that best represents their approach to delivering and implementing a client project. To support the data collection and analysis, a theoretical framework and propositions have been formulated based on a systematic literature review on Service Design, New Service Development, and Service Innovation.

Findings

In contrast with a definition of service design as a phase within NSD (Edvardsson et al., 2000), this research discusses Service Design as an approach to service innovation that can inform the overall NSD process. A distinction here is made between contributions from specific design skills (graphic design, web design, co-design, etc.) and from design as an attitude. Different challenges and needs have emerged when adopting this approach within existing organisations (i.e. conflicts between art and science logics), when using it to design and develop new ventures (i.e. maintaining design attitude across the innovation and delivery teams) or when trying to measure its value and impact.

Originality

Systematic studies on how Service Design agencies operate in practice and how they contribute to service innovation and development are very limited (Kimbell, 2011; Zomerdijik and Voss, 2011; Stigliani and Fayard, 2010). This paper provides an interpretative framework and propositions to question and document how Design is currently applied and could be better applied within service innovation and development processes.