The Service Innovation Handbook: Action-oriented Creative Thinking Toolkit for Service Organizations
Author
Lucy Kimbell
Publication Date
January 2015
Publisher
BIS Publishers
Intrigued by terms such as design thinking, service design and experience design? Lucy Kimbell’s Service Innovation Handbook brings together the latest academic research, and leading examples of innovative service organizations and the consultancies they work with, to outline what is involved in designing innovative services.

This book provides a language and practical concepts to help readers start brining these approaches into their own organizations. It’s aimed at people studying or working in contexts trying to tackle complex challenges through service innovation, who might come from backgrounds in design, user research, IT, management, policy or entrepreneurship.

Organized in eight chapters, Service Innovation Handbook includes 15 practical tools to stimulate creative approaches at the early stages of designing innovative services and 16 cases describing how different organizations have designed services.

Examples come from big firms such as Google, Microsoft, Barclays and Capita as well as start-ups, small businesses, social innovation and policy contexts. Examples include Airbnb, the Danish prison and probation service, Kaiser Permanente, churn in mobile phone customers, voter registration, high end car servicing and the Frugal Digital initiative. Each chapter combines academic research from several fields to help readers make sense of why organizations design innovative services, and what is involved in doing this.

The book helps readers understand how designing innovative services is distinct from other kinds of innovation and designing. It also outlines the key activities they can undertake at an early stage of an innovation process that support collective action when ambiguity is high, the impact of changes is significant and investment is low.

Illustrated and designed by Andrew Boag, the book makes complex ideas accessible, making it a practical resource for managers, designers, technologists and entrepreneurs.

The Service Innovation Handbook: Action-oriented Creative Thinking Toolkit for Service Organizations
Filed under: airbnb, case studies, agile, public services, visualization, mapping, ecosystems, experience, behaviour, persona, storyboard, methods, theory, lego, cultural probes.
 Rate this book
Guest tags and ratings are provisional. Sign in to confirm.
Share your perspective. Does this book belong in the service design canon? What are the most important points to take away? Please share any links to reviews or other information regarding this book or its themes.
Your Name *
E-mail Address *
Website
+ Upload Image
  
Check your inbox for confirmation after you submit your comment. Follow the link in the e-mail for approval. You should only need to do this once.
  1. Foreword by Professor Fred Collopy
  2. Chapter 1 Getting ready (download chapter here)
  3. Case 1 Turning data about phone usage into a resource at 3
  4. Case 2 Staging a different conversation about digital services at Microsoft
  5. Method 1 Self-reflection
  6. Chapter 2 Contexts, strategies, value creation
  7. Case 3 Turning sofabeds into resources and rethinking travel experiences at Airbnb
  8. Case 4 Agile organizing for democracy by reconfiguring resources through NYCVotes
  9. Method 2 Visualizing drivers of change
  10. Method 3 Mapping innovation ecosystems
  11. Chapter 3 Behaving and experiencing
  12. Case 5 Changing nurses’ care-giving practices at Kaiser Permanente
  13. Case 6 Changing behaviours through amplifying positive deviance in Danish prisons
  14. Method 4 Mapping the user experience
  15. Method 5 Creating a persona/storyworld
  16. Chapter 4 Exploring and analyzing
  17. Case 7 Using thick data about how children play to reframe business opportunities at LEGO
  18. Case 8 Playing with cultural probes to generate new concepts in fast-moving consumer goods
  19. Method 6 Segmenting by meaning
  20. Method 7 Opportunity mapping
  21. Method 8 Problem/proposition definition
  22. Chapter 5 Inspiring and generating
  23. Case 9 Prototyping value-in-use by storytelling at Google
  24. Case 10 Recombining socio-cultural capacities through tinkering and improvisation at Frugal Digital
  25. Method 9 Sketching (PDF, 3.1 MB)
  26. Method 10 Telling stories (PDF, 3.4 MB)
  27. Chapter 6 Prototyping and playing design games
  28. Case 11 Combining existing concepts and activities with new ways of doing things through design games at MindLab
  29. Case 12 Prototyping a new after-sales service at Mercedes-Benz
  30. Method 11 Planning prototyping and design games (PDF, 3.1 MB)
  31. Method 12 Service blueprinting (PDF, 3 MB)
  32. Chapter 7 Understanding impact
  33. Case 13 Focusing on outcomes to design a business-to-business marketing solution
  34. Case 14 Using data to develop eco-driving behaviours at Fiat
  35. Method 13 Creating an outcomes framework (PDF, 3.6 MB)
  36. Method 14 Defining design principles (PDF, 2.3 MB)
  37. Chapter 8 Organizing for service innovation
  38. Case 15 Building service transformation capabilities at Capita
  39. Case 16 Developing agile innovation teams in financial services at Barclays
  40. Recipes for designing innovative services
  41. Afterword
  42. References