Category: SID literature

  • Ethnography and User Ethnography

    As someone who has done various types of ethnographic and interview research before, I was asked to provide some reading tips on that topic, for user research. If one looks at modern guidebooks, they tend to be quite good on the practical “how”, but neglect to say where many of the ideas come from. That…

  • Gaps with cultural twist

    The gaps model The gaps model of service quality was developed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry in 1990. It is a useful framework for understanding service quality in an organization. The gap model consists of 5 gaps (one customer gap and four provider gaps). The most critical service quality gap is the customer gap –…

  • Design Thinking: A Left-Brain Viewpoint

    Constraints foster creativity. In this case, my own limitations. At the core, I am an analyst, a conceptual thinker used to dealing with words rather than images. Most of my best service design work so far has furthermore been done using traditional survey methods rather than the kind of innovative methods promoted by designers like…

  • We Are the New Design Thinkers!

    “How many of you consider yourselves as design thinkers?” asked our guest lecturer Gijs van Wulfen (Innovation Consultant and founder of FORTH Innovation method) when our SID 2014 group started the Design Thinking course. Not so many hands rose at that point, I was certainly hesitating. However, we were soon about to learn what Design…

  • Attitude matters in lean thinking: learn to fail fast for success!

    “Focus on the problem, not solution. You cannot quantify your way to the big max.” – Ola Sundell I still remember when ‘lean’ was a buzzword in manufacturing industry years and years ago. Lean concept was originally based on production process optimisation principles invented in Toyota for automotive industry back in early seventies. Now the…

  • Innovation in perspective

    In our first contact session with Gijs van Wulfen and Katja Tschimmel, we experienced a lightning version of an innovation process with Design Thinking: 2 days, not even 14 hours of work. And I’ve been wondering… What about real-life innovation? Can you expect to find a great brand new solution in just a couple of…

  • The Rabbit Hole of Design Thinking

    Professor and researcher Katja Tschimmel and ideation facilitator Gijs van Wulfen showed us where the Rabbit Hole of Design Thinking is. So I also jumped in it, dug together with fellows hands on for two full days – and we are still digging. The more we explore, the more we find. This post is about what…

  • Measuring Services – A Book Review

    – DO YOUR MATH! “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation” by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Loevlie and Ben Reason (2013 Rosenfeld Media) is a positively different service design book, whereas this – rather loose – book review is written as an extra assignment of the course New Service Development by Tiia-Marina Tuominen de Sousa e Silva…

  • Innovation and Development Activities in Professional Service Firms – a Role Structure Perspective, doctoral dissertation by Tiina Tuominen

    By Riku Seppälä I attended the public defence of Tiina Tuominen’s doctoral dissertation at Aalto University in Otaniemi, Espoo on 22nd February.  Title of her thesis is Innovation and development activities in professional service firms- a role structure perspective.  The thesis can be found here: http://otalib.aalto.fi/en/collections/e-publications/dissertations/

  • Organizing Service Operations in Manufacturing – Doctoral dissertation by Taija Turunen

    The service marketing literature is full of examples about servitization of products. How companies like Rolls Royce, KONE, IBM and many others have turned the game around by servitizing the traditional product oriented business. The literature has been evolving from product-related services to service orientation and new services development as areas of exploration for manufacturers. Recently…