The Challenges of In-House Service Design in Organizational Transformation: A Case Study of a Multinational Manufacturing Corporation

As a human and customer-centric methodology and development practice, service design inevitably starts affecting service systems and organizations (Yu & Sangiorgi 2018). It can catalyse organizational transformation (Yu & Sangiorgi 2018) by changing existing organizational practices, behaviour and decision-making, by bringing in iterative and co-creative outside-in development strategies, to support multidisciplinary innovation (Andreassen et al. 2016, Junginger 2008). However, the academic conversation does not sufficiently bring forward the organizational challenges that appear, when in-house service design is included in the organization’s research and development (R&D) activities. Such understanding is crucial since it provides knowledge on what areas to develop internally, to enhance organizational efficiency in support of transformation towards human and customer-centric working cultures. Therefore, this qualitative research brings to attention organizational challenges from the perspective of in-house service design. The research is a case study conducted by the author, within a multinational manufacturing corporation. Conventional content analysis is used as the data analysis method. The results of this study present the qualitative internal organizational challenges from five perspectives, which occur when in-house service design is brought into an engineering-based organization. Specifically, where expert-driven and technology-oriented cultures drive development.