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Top1. Introduction
The credibility is a challenging feature in the consultant activities, such as service design (Wu & Gong, 2012). There are several ways to achieve credibility during co-design services. Pirinen (2016) finds 20 barriers and enablers of co-design for services. He names five main categories for barriers and enables of co-design for services: collaboration, organization, processes, implementation, methods (Pirinen, 2016). One possibility to achieve authority is to use credible means and methods in the service design process, such as the latest digital platforms, environment or other digital means. Also, Pirinen (2016) sees the role of methods as important part of successful design service process. In addition to openness and flexibility of methods, also well-focused and well-prepared methods, for instance, are relevant part of successful co-design for services (Pirinen, 2016). Another way to achieve credibility is the tight cooperation during service design process (Wu & Gong 2012, Pirinen, 2016). This article is based on the service design process, where both of these features, that is, the latest digital environment and cooperation – or actually co-production – are present. Thus, this study describes the project activities and their outcomes, when the project is focused on to design the business in the co-prototyping environment. This digital design service process covered 14 enterprises and their design process in the digital co-prototyping environment.
Digital service design is very topical perspective in the contemporary business and service environment. According to Williams, Chatterjee and Rossi (2008), while software design was (about 10 years ago) a growing and maturing field, digital service design was an emerging and nascent field. Today, services itself as well as the service design activities often contain and exploit digital platforms, software and environments. For example, Liu, Werder and Mädche (2016) have introduced the taxonomy of digital service design techniques. According to them, there are five dimensions in this taxonomy: design phases (planning, draft prototyping, detailed prototyping, launching), time dependency (real-time feedback, retrospective feedback), duration (long-term study, short-term study), participants (user involved, without user) and evaluation types (questionnaire, interview, experiment, observation, group discussion) (Liu, Werder & Mädche, 2016). The comparisons between the typologies introduced by Liu and colleagues (2016) and by Pirinen (2016) show that it is possible to categorize and consider service design process very different ways. However, careful planning and collaboration, for instance, are important part of design process in both of these studies (Liu et al., 2016; Pirinen, 2016).
This study is based on the experiences of the project, which focused on to develop the content of business and business models among 14 participating Finnish enterprises of the project. The studied design process was supported by digital co-prototyping environment. The research question of this study is: what kind of role digital methods, and especially co-prototyping environment have in the design process generally, and especially in the considered case study? The studied 14 firms were located in the same geographical area. In order to save the business secrets of the case study firms, the area and names of the firm are kept anonymous in this study.