Service design as a source of competitive advantage for big corporations and for small and medium sized enterprises

Abstract

Shifting from manufacturing-based economy to a service and knowledge led economy has resulted in the increased need to design user experiences involving services. Designing such services is a complex task and various mechanisms of collaboration need to put in place between the designers, businesses both big and small, customers and other stakeholders, in order to design services and concepts which are perceived as valuable by the intended users. This will mainly be achieved through an extensive literature review on the theories of service design and design thinking, from the perspective of their evolution as concepts, as well as the key drivers of their use and obstacles in the adoption of service design as the new mainstream of strategic management of both large corporations and SMEs. Special emphasis will be given to the definitions of both service design and design thinking, in order to understand the similarities and differences in their contexts, to build a base to understand how big companies and SMEs may utilize the design principles to engage their user communities as a form of competitive advantage. The thesis also plans to provide recommendations for future study, in order to assist the academic community to establish service design as an academic field of study. Ever since the introduction of the terms design and design thinking by Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon, the notion of design thinking has attracted wide attention among the academia and design practitioners, especially so after the early 2000s, as a wide variety of organisations, academic institutions, businesses and service providers have addressed issues related to service design. There is still an ongoing debate among both the academia and the practitioners, whether service design and design thinking are just another trendy words which will fade away in few years time or whether they are here to stay. Some of the key contributing factors in the growth of interest towards service design have been the changes in the economic structure.