Innovation through service design:from research and theory to a network of practice. A users’ driven perspective

Abstract

A great amount of the revenues of GNP of these countries comes from the production, distribution and trade of services: this part of economy had been constantly increasing in the last decades. While manufacturing is slipping to less than 20% of GDP, by 2002 the share of the service sector amounts to about 70% of total value added in most OECD countries (Wolfl, 2005). The increasing relevance of the service sector is not exclusively bound to the growing of the service firms revenues, as it seems to be a general increase of the service dimension in the overall economy: “…both the white-collar share of industrial workforces, and the service share of industrial firms’ output are generally growing, together with the growth of specialised service firms…” (Howells and Miles, 2001). Becoming services the major driving force within contemporary economy, a wide debate is taking place on strategic issues like service productivity, innovation and international trade. Even if the interdependence between manufacturing and services is growing and sometimes their relative borders are blurring (Pilat and Wolfl, 2005), the specific nature of services asks for distinct support and intervention models and policies. The discussed distinctive characteristics of services _ intangibility, heterogeneity, interactivity (simultaneous production and consumption) and perishability (Zeithaml and Bitner, 2000) _ and of service firms _ generally small sized, typically focused on domestic or regional markets, knowledge intensive, etc. _ have important consequences on the evaluation and support of their productivity and innovation capacity and tradability potentials. This paper wants to deepen the peculiarity of the service economy and of its innovation modes in order to investigate and propose a strategic role for design research and education. The basic question is if we can create innovation through services development and how Service Design can contribute to the definition of a renewed and integrated innovation model and approach. To validate this statement in particular the authors refers to an emerging discipline, Service Design, that was born in the early 90’s (Manzini, 1993; Erlhoff et. al., 1997) starting from the awareness of the lack of an organic and autonomous design culture in contrast with the dominant economic vision of service sector and the consequent demand for more conscious design shapes. This intuition opened a new experimental and research area that have been framed by PhD researches (Pacenti, 1998; Sangiorgi, 2004) and further developed within research and educational projects, developing dedicated design tools and methodologies.