How can we enable human-centered service innovation? A service design perspective (Story 1) Cecilia Lee https://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilialeegeneva/ Utpal Mangla https://www.linkedin.com/in/utpal-mangla-b748541/

1. How can we enable human-centered
service innovation? A service design
perspective (Story 1)
Authors: Cecilia Lee & Utpal Mangla
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.

2. 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

3. 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).
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the Internet of Everything. Communications of the Association for Information Systems,
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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,
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Kleinschmidt, S.; Burkhard, B.; Hess, M.; Peters, C. & Leimeister, J. M. (2016): Towards
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http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3159144
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4. Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action.
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