Service Innovation Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In the last decade, service design has seen a rapid diffusion, with several service design agencies established globally and commercial organizations willing to adopt it. This quick expansion is mainly due to an increasing focus of organizations on services and customer experience, building also on the need for businesses to digitalize their commercial offers and core operations. Despite the uptake of service design in practice, research has yet to deliver systematic empirical studies, rigorous analysis, and careful theorizing of service design and its fit within the strategies, practices, and processes of organizations (Ostrom, et al., 2015; Andreassen, et al., 2016). Service design’s theoretical foundations can be found in a wide range of
academic fields that span from design to management (Kimbell, 2011; Karpen, et al., 2017), making it difficult to locate and develop a cohesive argument on the topic.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to laying the foundations to systematically start investigating service design in an organizational context. I will use an institutional logics perspective, one of the key themes in institutional theory. Through this perspective, the study aims at clarifying the elements characterizing the organizational environment within which service design is introduced and the mechanisms for its adoption in such an organizational context.

The study confronts two research questions:
1. What are the elements characterizing the organizational context within which service design is introduced that influence its introduction and existence?
2. How do the mechanisms that favor service design adoption in an
organizational context operate?

To seek answers to these questions, I have employed a qualitative and interpretative research design. Nine large, western organizations operating across eight different sectors are analyzed, who have all opted to introduce service design to tackle a diverse range of pressing business challenges. The nine organizations are first analyzed in an exploratory fashion, aiming to understand how service design played out in these different organizational contexts (Study1). I have then selected one of the nine, Telenor Group, identified as a revelatory setting, and have developed an
in-depth case on service design in an organizational context (Study2). This study has utilized primary data emerging from in-depth interviews with key informants. Observation has also been carried out, and the study has employed secondary data sources emerging from company website and social media channels.

The study suggests that service design can be conceptualized as simultaneously virtual and material, characterized by a defined set of principles and practices. The principles characterizing service design are: human-centered, co-creative, holistic, experimental, and transformative. The practices characterizing service design are: conducting design research, ideating, visualizing, prototyping, and sequencing. Findings suggest that service design enters the organization through the emerging
customer logic, conceptualized as an organizational logic of competitiveness that reflects a system guiding specific competitive choices. Service design enters the organization using the channel offered by the emerging customer logic, representing a way for the logic to materialize itself in practice and to suggest a clear alternative model to new service development and innovation. Findings suggest that the
customer logic is immersed in a constellation of three logics, respectively Telco, Digital, and Customer; such a constellation is subject to five constellational forces. The constellation of logics and its constellational forces determine the environment within which service design is introduced. The five constellational forces emerge as follows: (1) exogenous forces, (2) constellational relationships among the three logics, (3) the nature of the recombinant strategies used to introduce each of the logics, (4) individual actions, and (5) organizational goal. Findings also suggest that the mechanisms that favor the growth of service design adoption are enacted by organizational members carriers of the customer logic, and are exercised across four stages (sensitizing to service design principles, embedding service design practices, securing human resources, growing enabling structures) via eleven distinct activities (expose, simplify, customize, familiarize, engage, locate, specialize, track, incentivize, measure, evaluate).

This study offers two major contributions to the existing body of knowledge:
1. It contributes to the stream of research on design legacies. By analyzing the intra-organizational context within which service design is introduced, the study offers an understanding of the organizational environment within which service design is introduced as shaped by the constellation of logics and constellational forces.
2. It contributes to the stream of research on design capabilities. The study offers a transformative model to explain how service design capabilities grow in an organizational context and the role of organizational actors in their evolution.