A Review of Service Design Pedagogy to Identify Potential Added Value to Product Innovation in Higher Education

Abstract

It is widely accepted that service design is a discipline that is becoming increasingly recognized as a key element for productive collaboration between multidisciplinary stakeholders. However, it is difficult to understand the interplay between service design and product innovation in higher education. There is a gap in the service design literature on how its way of teaching can enable better product innovation if introduced within product innovation degrees. This study seeks to explore how product innovation might be stimulated by service design teaching, with a focus on collaborative participant activities often used within the service design discipline. Previous studies on service design pedagogy have provided various frameworks for teaching service design that are often drawn from different disciplinary perspectives, such as engineering, social sciences, marketing, business, etc. This article, in contrast, examines service design pedagogy strategies applied in design education within the realm of product innovation. A bibliometric analysis method was adopted to review the existing literature. We found that the selected studies touched upon several themes, which all relate to collaboration among participants and stakeholders in service design and product innovation. The findings shed light on specific projects and case studies that were implemented via team collaboration. Further analysis proposes that the service design pedagogy in design education enhances product design via wider value considerations such as sustainability principles and methods. This study begins to illustrate how service design as a systemic approach to designing products might better enable product innovators to consider wider aspects of value co-creation and sustainability via explicitly involving and considering wider stakeholder networks beyond simply designing a product for a user.