A framework for innovative service design

ABSTRACT

Drawing on research from design science, marketing, and service science, our paper provides an integrated framework for evaluating and directing innovative service design. The main goal of our review is to highlight the strengths of existing frameworks and to suggest how they can be enhanced in combination with design science principles. Based on our review, we propose a new framework for the design of innovative services that integrates several key paradigmatic approaches and identifies fundamental open research questions. Our approach is unique as it combines three service disciplines, namely services marketing, service science, and design science, and provides a new framework that describes step by step the procedure that needs to be taken and the conditions that need to be met for developing innovative services. We believe that providing such a framework is a valuable addition to the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Service design
• services innovation
• design science
• service–dominant logic
• customer co-creation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Olivier Furrer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3618-4369

Rodoula H. Tsiotsou http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2035-0334

Notes

1. There is a strong stream of research (notably Hevner et al., 2004; Hevner & Chatterjee, 2010) on design science research in information systems. Their work provides invaluable directions for design science research even though it is specially oriented to the various elements and linkages of information systems. Hevner et al. (2004) provide seven guidelines for conducting research on service design. The seven guidelines are: (1) Design as an artifact, (2) problem relevance, (3) design evaluation, (4) research contributions, (5) research rigor, (6) design as a search process, and (7) communications of research. For our purposes in developing a framework for designing new services in contrast to providing a framework for conducting design science research, we sought out and have brought to the current audience axioms from the literature that focus on understanding and determining when a design is an innovation and when it is a good innovation that is both an invention and commercially valuable. The Design Science literature which we have cited provides the framework that we believe meets our goals.