Leveraging the potential of service design in non-design-intensive organizations: A knowledge transfer view

Service design is increasingly understood as a valuable approach to service innovation, and several initiatives are in place to insource and explicitly develop service design within non-design-intensive organizations instead of just outsourcing design work from external design agencies. Given this growing phenomenon, there is an explicit need to better understand how non-design-intensive organizations can develop and distribute design knowledge internally, not solely depending on an exclusive group of design professionals. This question is the focus of this dissertation, that has specifically developed a conceptual model for investigating design knowledge transfer between service designers and staff members. As a first step to address design research gaps on the topic, this PhD integrated knowledge transfer literature from the broader field of knowledge management (KM) to develop an initial conceptual model that would complement current interpretations of the development of service design in organizations. That lens introduced missing theoretical concepts that acknowledge the heterogeneity of knowledge sources and recipients, the nature of transferred knowledge, the diversity of knowledge strategies and mechanisms, and the underlying organizational contexts. Secondly, this dissertation employed a qualitative and interpretative research design, conducting two in-depth case studies, one of a public sector organization (a regional County Council) and one of a private sector organization (a consultancy) that have been leveraging service design internally, addressing the emerging issue of design knowledge transfer.  Based on those case studies, this research recognized first how the underlying organizational contexts, and in particular the organizational structures, conditioned design knowledge transfer dynamically over time. Findings suggested that the division of work in the organizations and the departmentalization were two elements generating distance or proximity between service designers and staff members over time, and therefore controlling the opportunities for them to interact and to transfer knowledge directly to each other. Secondly, findings revealed that organizations relied essentially on the use of person-to-person networks as a means to transfer knowledge (personalization strategy) rather them on the use of documents and technology (codification strategy) and that they were greatly operating informally and at an individual level (individualization tactics) rather than formally at a group level (institutionalized tactics). Moreover, despite those overarching trends, findings revealed that the strategies were not static but slowly evolved based on the increase in number and diversity of knowledge transfer mechanisms (beyond projects) that built on each other and collectively expanded the possible ways to scale-up design knowledge. Thirdly, findings revealed that the knowledge flows between service designers and staff members were not unidirectional, as service designers and staff members' knowledge bases were both being affected, and they were not bound to fixed roles as knowledge sources and recipients. Finally, findings suggest not a full replication of professional serviced design knowledge of the service design teams but in a gradual formulation of a new type of design knowledge (organizational design knowledge) with different properties. Based on those observations, this research proposed a reification of the original knowledge transfer model and formalized the Design Knowledge Transfer model. The DKT model conceives design knowledge transfer as a contextual, dynamic, and bidirectional phenomenon that can lead to the transformation of professional design knowledge into organizational design knowledge. This study offers three major contributions to the existing body of knowledge on service design research:  • It introduces a new perspective on how to understanding the growth of service design in organizations based on the transference of design knowledge, informed by the knowledge management field • It offers the Design Knowledge Transfer model as a more temporal, situated, and flexible way to understand and interpret the transference and amplification of design knowledge in organizations. • It introduces a conceptual differentiation between the professional design knowledge and the organizational design knowledge to place in evidence a transformation rather than a simple replication led by the transference and scaling-up of design knowledge within organizations.

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