Service Design as an Approach to Implement the Value Cocreation Perspective in New Service Development

Although new service development (NSD) studies have contributed to developing systematic approaches to service innovation, their product-oriented and provider-centric perspectives are limited in embracing a value cocreation concept. We investigate how Service Design, as a human-centered and creative approach to service innovation, can reframe NSD processes to implement value cocreation. Multiple case studies on Service Design projects indicate that design-centric approaches can contribute to the whole NSD process in a way that connects organizations’ managerial practices to value cocreation, in that (1) contextual and holistic understandings of user experiences can inform value propositions that better fit users’ value-in-use, (2) codesign with creative supporting tools can facilitate value cocreation by helping users better apply their own resources, (3) prototyping can optimize firms’ resource and process configuration to facilitate users’ engagement with the service, (4) aligning system actors to the user experience can organize and mobilize them to better support users’ value creation, and (5) user-centered approaches and methods can help organizational staff build long-term capability for supporting users’ value creation. Based on the link between Service Design, NSD, and value cocreation, we propose a conceptual NSD model, geared toward value cocreation.