Organizational Transformation Through In-House Service Design: a Case Study of a Multinational Manufacturing Corporation

Service design is increasingly being applied as a practice in the area of manufacturing industry (Costa et al. 2018). It has a growing and evolving role in service and organizational development due to its effective means of human and customer-centric problem-solving. Service design affects service systems and end-to-end processes in addition to the behaviours and decision-making of an organization. Yet, the academic conversation is still missing on how it begins to transform organizations. Therefore, this study asks, how has in-house service design supported an organization to transform its working culture towards human and customer-centricity? This understanding is especially important in engineering-based technology-oriented cultures where strong decision-making-based attitudes thrive. The results of this study are based on a case study conducted by the first author. The used analysis methods are coding and thematic analysis. We present that in-house service design supports an organization to transform its working culture towards human and customer-centricity through the change aspects of individuals and an organization. The individual change aspects relate to changing attitudes, mindsets, and beliefs. These form the preconditions for change aspects of an organization, which relate to an organizational paradigm transformation through strategy renewal affected by human and customer-centric values.