The Service Innovation Handbook

If you want to make change happen by designing innovative services, and you're not quite sure where to start, then start with this book.

It focuses on the tricky early stages of a project, and orients readers towards the conceptual and practical challenges involved in creating new service ecosystems that addresses organizational and social issues.

Service Innovation Handbook shows how understanding user and customer experiences by analyzing ethnographic and big data, combined with exploratory prototyping, helps agile teams designing innovative services to develop the concepts and knowledge they need. The book is brought further to life with examples from start-ups, big corporations, policy contexts and social innovation.

Educator and researcher Lucy Kimbell synthesizes the most important research and practice in design thinking, business anthropology, service management and organizational studies. Grounded in academic inquiry and practical knowledge, her approach is thorough but accessible. With 16 case studies and 14 methods, this book provides multiple entry points for readers who want to think and do things differently. Service Innovation Handbook is a companion and guide for situations with high level of ambiguity and uncertainty, in which the only way forard is to combine creativity with analysis.

• Foreword by Professor Fred Collopy
1. Getting ready
• Case 1: Turning data about phone usage into a resource at 3
• Case 2: Staging a different conversation about digital services at Microsoft
• Method 1: Self-reflection
2. Contexts, strategies, value creation
• Case 3: Turning sofabeds into resources and rethinking travel experiences at Airbnb
• Case 4: Agile organizing for democracy by reconfiguring resources through NYCVotes
• Method 2: Visualizing drivers of change
• Method 3: Mapping innovation ecosystems
3. Behaving and experiencing
• Case 5: Changing nurses’ care-giving practices at Kaiser Permanente
• Case 6: Changing behaviours through amplifying positive deviance in Danish prisons
• Method 4: Mapping the user experience
• Method 5: Creating a persona/storyworld
4. Exploring and analyzing
• Case 7: Using thick data about how children play to reframe business opportunities at LEGO
• Case 8: Playing with cultural probes to generate new concepts in fast-moving consumer goods
• Method 6: Segmenting by meaning
• Method 7: Opportunity mapping
• Method 8: Problem/proposition definition
5. Inspiring and generating
• Case 9: Prototyping value-in-use by storytelling at Google
• Case 10: Recombining socio-cultural capacities through tinkering and improvisation at Frugal Digital
• Method 9: Sketching
• Method 10: Telling stories
6. Prototyping and playing design games
• Case 11: Combining existing concepts and activities with new ways of doing things through design games at MindLab
• Case 12: Prototyping a new after-sales service at Mercedes-Benz
• Method 11: Planning prototyping and design games
• Method 12: Service blueprinting
7. Understanding impact
• Case 13: Focusing on outcomes to design a business-to-business marketing solution
• Case 14: Using data to develop eco-driving behaviours at Fiat
• Method 13: Creating an outcomes framework
• Method 14: Defining design principles
8. Organizing for service innovation
• Case 15: Building service transformation capabilities at Capita
• Case 16: Developing agile innovation teams in financial services at Barclays
• Recipe 1: Quick wins to improve an existing service
• Recipe 2: Innovation exploration for an existing service and team
• Recipe 3: Innovation exploration for a new team working together on an issue

Explains the concept of Service Design and describes very practical ways of working with them.

Nothing stands out, but it is not a bad book for someone that has never worked with the concepts before.