Abstract
The service sector is now the dominant part of many western economies – and seems to be growing in importance. To differentiate their offerings; service providers need to be innovative to meet conscious and unconscious user needs. The innovation process to improve and redesign the way organizations deliver services demands collaboration from multiple sources; of which two are competence in design and in strategic leadership. The variety of services offered in the market raises cross-functional internal and external service leadership issues. How businesses understand and organize design activities can have a profound impact on the innovation process and outcome. Organizational leaders are often not designers. However; they are part of the design and innovation process in creating the vision and by making design-related decisions to obtain the envisioned future. The emergence of the service economy calls for rethinking within leadership. Thus; the term service design leadership is introduced in this paper to reflect a new attitude towards leadership in the service economy in response to the characteristics of services.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2009.9
Citation
Gloppen, J.(2009) Service Design Leadership, in Clatworthy, S., Nisula, J.-V., & Holmlid, S. (eds.), ServDes 2009: DeThinking Service; ReThinking Design, 24-26 November, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2009.9
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Papers
Service Design Leadership
The service sector is now the dominant part of many western economies – and seems to be growing in importance. To differentiate their offerings; service providers need to be innovative to meet conscious and unconscious user needs. The innovation process to improve and redesign the way organizations deliver services demands collaboration from multiple sources; of which two are competence in design and in strategic leadership. The variety of services offered in the market raises cross-functional internal and external service leadership issues. How businesses understand and organize design activities can have a profound impact on the innovation process and outcome. Organizational leaders are often not designers. However; they are part of the design and innovation process in creating the vision and by making design-related decisions to obtain the envisioned future. The emergence of the service economy calls for rethinking within leadership. Thus; the term service design leadership is introduced in this paper to reflect a new attitude towards leadership in the service economy in response to the characteristics of services.