‘Go Big or Go Home’? Mergers, acquisitions, and the impact on service design
What’s behind the ongoing trend of mergers and acquisitions in the world of service design? And what does it mean for the way our discipline is being practiced? Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes takes a deep dive into this issue, speaking to several people at the forefront of this trend, and offers his insights on Jesse Grimes, Editor-in-Chief for Touchpoint, has nine years experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Jesse is also on the Man agement Board of the Service Design Network.
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what it means for service design. Ten to fifteen years ago, when service design was still a young discipline, it was largely carried out by a handful of dedicated agencies, such as Livework and Engine in London. As the years progressed, new agencies sprung up, with the geographical focus of service design continuing to be northwest Europe, the UK and the Scandinavian and Nordic regions. Simultaneously, agencies whose specialisms made them natural candidates to adopt service design established internal practices of their own, such as Adaptive Path (UX) and IDEO (product design). More recently, mirroring a trend that started much earlier within the world of UX, the establishment of in-house service design departments became more commonplace. Rather than relying on short-term, project-based engagements, large companies and public sector entities built teams of service designers that operated internally, day in and day out. (See the theme articles of Touchpoint Vol. 7 No. 2 on ‘In-house Service Design’, and
‘The Evolution of Innovation Labs’ in Touchpoint Vol. 8 No. 2 for more coverage of these trends.) But starting over three years ago, a new trend started to ripple across the world of service design practice: acquisitions and mergers. Rather than relying on organic growth to establish service design capability, companies began to acquire entire agencies at once, and design agencies merged forces to rapidly expand their offerings. And the big players driving this trend have been the global management consulting firms. Before diving into my observations on the implications of this trend for service design, it’s worthwhile pointing out that service design capabilities may not have always been the key attribute which triggered the acquisition in the first place; in some cases, it is the overall design expertise that was being sought, whether digital or product. With that being said, my focus indeed falls on what it means for service design.
