ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 21st century, service innovation and service design are emerging as objects of academic inquiry in several fields of research and as domains of practitioner expertise. Services are already dominant in terms of gross national product (GDP) and employment in developed countries, so the relative lack of academic attention is perhaps surprising. Leading firms such as IBM now earn a major share of their business revenue from sales of services to clients, prompting some of them to urge the creation of a ‘services science’.1 Now that service (in the singular) – rather than products – is being proposed as a way of thinking about the value-creating activities within what we typically call economies,2 it becomes even more important to attend to the designing of services.
