Service Ecosystem Design: Propositions, Process Model, and Future Research Agenda
In the last three and a half decades, academic literature on service design has evolved considerably and has moved away from the reductionist perspective of service design on developing new offerings to improve customer experience. For Vink, Koskela-Huotari, Tronvoll, Edvardsson and Wetter-Edman (2020) the changes around the understanding of service design can be organized in three horizons:
Design of services: initiated by the work of Lynn Shostack in the early 80s, perceive service design as an early stage in the new service development process.
Design for services: in the early 2000s, a number of service design scholars started to rethink service design as a process of co-design with staff and users to create the conditions for value-in-use.
Service ecosystem design: proposed by the authors and defined as “the intentional shaping of institutional arrangements and their physical enactments by actor collectives through reflexivity and reformation to facilitate the emergence of desired value cocreation forms” (Vink, Koskela-Huotari, Tronvoll, Edvardsson and Wetter-Edman, 2020).
This new concept of service ecosystem design paves way to a new chapter of service design research. The authors identify specific research questions for each of the future research areas: extending the systemic conceptualization of service design; conducting more holistic empirical investigations into service design; developing practical methods and approaches for embedded, collective designing.
Source: Vink, Koskela-Huotari, Tronvoll, Edvardsson and Wetter-Edman (2020
To a full understanding of the evolving conceptualization of service design I recommend a deeper reading of this paper.
Joana Dias
29 Dec 2020
Sources: Vink, J., Koskela-Huotari, K., Tronvoll, B., Edvardsson, B. & Wetter-Edman, K., (2020). Service Ecosystem Design: Propositions, Process Model, and Future Research Agenda. Journal of Service Research, XX(X), 1-19
Vink, J. (2020). The Three Horizons of Service Design. https://www.servsig.org/wordpress/2020/11/the-three-horizons-of-service-design/