New Issues and Opportunities in Service Design Research

Abstract

In an era of intense high-speed competition, offering to the marketplace a sustainable and profitable value proposition that effectively leverages a firm’s financial, human, and operational resources is critical to both established and emerging businesses. To complicate matters further, in emerging industries such as e-services, customers often do not know what they want or need, consequently limiting a the company’s ability to engineer market-winning product–service solutions. While companies develop their own strategies to compete effectively in the “new” new economy, this competitive environment offers many opportunities to scholars interest in studying services. For example, should an enterprise merely try to adapt to the e-services marketplace? Should it keep juggling with the endless list of alternative service offerings? Or should it strive to shape the future of the business environment within which it operates by offering innovative product–service bundles?