Designing Innovative Services Begins with Four Questions - Lance Bettencourt - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Service providers, like product sellers, must innovate constantly to keep their edge in the marketplace. But a very common problem prevents many from achieving innovation breakthroughs: They tend to be held back by their very zeal to achieve unsurpassed service. The problem begins with their fixation on comparative measurements of service quality. If you work for a service provider, or are on the receiving end of marketing messages from one, you know how important such metrics are for building customer trust. Service quality research is also the main tool many service providers use to identify opportunities for service improvement. But by necessity it keeps the focus on service offerings that already exist. And it keeps management's understanding of customer value tightly yoked to what is available today, devaluing any prospects for real innovation.

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Design Leads Us Where Exactly - Is 2009 The Year Service Design Emerges

Lucy Kimbell is the Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford with a background in interaction design and visual/live arts. Her interest has been in the field of design thinking. This piece is from her recent blog and is an excellent summary of this emerging field. A Google search for “service design” is one way of indexing what is a growing field of practice and scholarly enquiry. On the basis of a search today (December 16, 2009), the term is resonant enough to have a long-ish entry in wikipedia (although it “provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject”). What comes next are links to two consultancies: Engine (based in London) and live|work (ditto). Practice leads theory, then. But although they are leading the field, they are extremely small – 20 people at the former, 13 people at the latter, according to their websites today. This was a year in which service design began to move away from being the province of designers educated and practicing in the art school tradition to an activity in which designers have something important to contribute, but which is not necessarily owned by Design.

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