Introduction: On Service Innovation

It’s a process that’s dramatically improved people’s lives, not to mention the health of businesses and the quality of collaboration between them.

Livework believes that people deserve better services, and that design is the best way to create them. But the world is getting more complex, people’s expectations never stop climbing, and thinking outside the box is no longer enough. We need new boxes, new services, that answer today’s unmet needs, and tomorrow’s too.

This takes us a step beyond service design, into a new category of problem-solving: service innovation. If service design is improving the way checkout works at the supermarket, service innovation is redesigning the store so that checkout is no longer necessary and store staff can focus on servicing customers. It means questioning the assumptions that went into previous solutions, proposing new ones that work at a system level, and addressing the problem underlying the problem.

If this all sounds uncomfortably ill-defined, that’s because the crucial problems of the new century are just that. The purpose of service innovation is to tackle them boldly, because the comfortable, well-constrained ones have already been solved. It’s how we help the world face challenges that sometimes seem unsolvable.