How can we enable human-centered service innovation? A service design perspective (Story 1)
Authors: Cecilia Lee (LI) & Utpal Mangla (LI)
The scholars in the service innovation literature often describe innovation through a processual lens and emphasize the aspect of new value creation (e.g. Maglio, 2017; Demirkan et al, 2015). The rise of emerging technologies, such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated the innovation process, but it has also added more complexity to the innovation process.
Many corporate executives have recently adopted human-centered design or design thinking (Kleinschmidt et al, 2016) in their innovation efforts to accelerate the innovation process. This phenomenon is also well observed in service innovation, as service design is increasingly adopted by many organizations led by service-oriented sectors, such as finance, healthcare, and tourism. Service Design is not a new concept. It was first introduced by Shostack (1982) in her article – Design for Services – in the 80s, and Bitner, Ostrom, and Morgan (2008) introduced the service blueprint as a tool to design for service to enable service innovation.
With the growing traction in design thinking practice by corporate executives in a service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; 2016) economy, service design has emerged as a human-centered approach that explores opportunities to reconfigure resources and enhance innovation through the value co-creation process (Andreassen et al, 2016). The existing literature that examines service design operationalizes it as a problem-solving process that can explore wicked problems in a messy world and that allows actors within the service system to collaboratively identify potential solutions (e.g. Salgado et al 2017; Griffione et al, 2017). The service design process is iterative and incorporates a reflection-in-action approach (Schön, 1983), and this iterative and adaptive process offers superior explanatory power for the study of emerging phenomena in a service-dominant logic economy in which value-in-use continuously evolves with the use context.
A theoretical perspective of service design and its relationship to service innovation suggests that service design can be an enabler for human-centered service innovation. However, how service design is used in the context of service innovation is largely dependent on how service design is defined and operationalized in each organization. Some organizations use service design as an enabler for digital transformation and adopt service design research, prototyping, and iteration process to ensure their new service offerings create value for the user groups they serve. The Healthcare sector is a great example that fits this category. The national health service (NHS) in the UK has actively adopted service design in its digital transformation process to build a deeper understanding of its user needs and identify the solutions that serve these needs.
However, in the information and technology sector, it is not uncommon to see that service design is described as a tool or technique used for process mapping in order to implement the architecture of a service platform. In these organizations, service design is often understood and utilized, based on the terms defined by the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL); therefore, it often holds a highly mechanical view of designing a service, which often leaves many contextual elements that constitute user experience.
The academics in the service research community have recently started to explore an intricate relationship between service innovation and service design, and these studies often describe service design as an approach to enable human-centered service innovation. The recent research momentum in this space means that a more consistent conceptual understanding of the relationship between service innovation and service design is starting to take a foothold.
Despite some growing theoretical contributions around this topic, how service design is defined and used by industry practitioners in the real messy world remains lacking solid groundwork that defines what service design stands for in the context of service innovation and how it can be used as a pathway to service innovation. Our observations and industry expertise in emerging technologies reveal several actions we as industry practitioners could take to more effectively leverage service design to enable human-centered innovation.
In our view, design thinking is the key method or approach as industries are evolving towards creating a service design ecosystem within their organizations. Leveraging service design as a design thinking process from discovery to ideation to implementation has become essential to encompassing all the stakeholders and touchpoints in the ecosystem. With businesses moving into a platform-based economy, the need to bring together disparate pieces together becomes even more critical and an end-to-end ecosystem built on the solid foundations of service innovation is the path forward to meeting the requirements of service users, service providers, and intermediaries.
With this view in mind, we will introduce several actions we can take as a community of service innovation industry practitioners to better leverage service design to enable human-centered service innovation in our next blog entry.
References
Andreassen, T.W., Kristensson, P., Lervik-Olsen, L., and Edvardsson, B, and Colurcio, M. (2016). Linking service design to value creation and service research. Journal of Service Management, 27(1), 21-29.
Demirkan, H., Bess, C., Spohrer, J., Rayes, A., Allen, D., & Moghaddam, Y. (2015). Innovations with Smart Service Systems: Analytics, Big Data, Cognitive Assistance, and the Internet of Everything. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37, pp-pp. https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.03735
Griffioen, I., Melles, M., Stiggelbout, A. and Snelders, D. (2017). The potential of service design for improving the implementation of shared decision-making. Design for Health, 1(2), 194-209.
Kleinschmidt, S.; Burkhard, B.; Hess, M.; Peters, C. & Leimeister, J. M. (2016): Towards design principles for aligning human-centered service systems and corresponding business models. In: International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Dublin, Ireland. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3159144 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3159144
Maglio, P.P. (2017). Editorial column – new directions in service science: value cocreation in the age of autonomous service systems. Service Science, 9(1), 1-2.
Salgado, M., Wendland, M., Rodriguez, D., Bohren, M.A., Oladapo, O.T., Ojelade, O.A., Olalere, A.A., Luwangula, R., Mugerwa, K. and Fawole, B. (2017). Using a service design model to develop the “Passport to Safer Birth” in Nigeria and Uganda. International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics, 139(1), 56-66.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Maurice Temple Smith.
Shostack, G. L. (1982). How to design a service. European Journal of Marketing, 16(1), 49-63.
Vargo, S. L. and Lush, R.F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68, 1-17.
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2016). Institutions and axioms: An extension and update of
service-dominant logic. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44, 5-23.