FROM SERVICE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING TO SERVICE INNOVATION – A MODELING APPROACH

Due to the advent of digitization, service innovation has become even more important for both business and service research alike. Current service systems engineering approaches have employed a recombinant perspective that follows innovation mechanisms to leverage existing company resources for new service innovations. Employing these innovation mechanisms is still challenging, since there is little support on how to structure and identify these mechanisms. We propose a model-based service system engineering approach to structure existing resources into one formal model, enabling the formalization of service innovation mechanisms. The formalized service innovation mechanisms allow for a graphical illustration and enable future research to apply functions to analyze how innovation impacts entire or specific parts of service systems. Furthermore, the mathematical model enables an object-oriented value-driven perspective on service systems and is basis for graphical software tools. We contribute to literature by formalizing service innovations and its mechanisms in the context of service systems and by combining concepts of service innovation and service systems engineering. We do so by a) formalizing service innovation mechanisms and b) demonstrating the application of formal service innovations along one specific software implementation case. For practice, the service system model can with simulating the effects of service innovations.