Making the Case for Service Design for Startups and Innovation Applying our mindset and ways-of-working in a new frontier Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups Jesse Grimes has eleven years’ experience as a service designer and consultant. He is an independent practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot. com), and frequently works with start-ups and innovators, bringing a service designer’s perspective to help them create better products and services. Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network and Editorin-Chief of Touchpoint. jesse@kolmiot.com
and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings. In this article I’ll look at hurdles to address and overcome in terms of mindset, and suggest some practical ways service designers can address this opportunity. The innovation imperative Large corporations today face threats from many sides. No longer can they assume that their customers of today will be customers tomorrow, and that their products and services will remain in demand for the years and decades to come. Several factors have made it much easier for start-ups to cover the distance from ‘Day 1’ to becoming a marketdisrupting threat to those corporations within seemingly no time. Firstly, there are relatively low barriers for start-ups to enter the marketplace (and even become global players); with a good pitch deck and some demonstrated traction, huge amounts of venture
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capital are ready and waiting. Secondly, the ability to design and deliver fullydigital services – and create entirely new markets, often through providing new, scalable platforms that connect supply and demand – can be accomplished with relatively small initial investments. Thirdly, resources (such as AWS) and techniques (blitzscaling, growth hacking and viral customer acquisition) enable incredibly rapid growth when the conditions are right. And lastly, customer demand and expectations steadily rise, just as the possibilities offered by new technologies do. Start-ups are nimble and hungry enough to adapt to these changes in ways that established organisations are typically not.
