Making connections: Exploring value co-creation in service design projects

Ford is facing new competitors and changes in their market. To stay relevant, they have to deal with collaboration to solve complex problems, new technologies that enable new value propositions and a shift from products to services. Service design seemed like a promising approach to deal with those challenges and to come up with new services in a multi-stakeholder context. However, it was found that the service design process of the involved innovation team at Ford Research & Advanced Engineering has no clear structure and mainly focuses on gaining customer insights and coming up with a great value propositions for them. How value propositions could be delivered with and to multiple stakeholders to co-create value, while also capturing value from that for Ford, is not so much explored. Besides, it is not easy for the team to make the value of a new service explicit and clear for others. To be able to explore opportunities for co-creating value for multiple stakeholders with new services in the service design process, value co-creation building blocks and a value co-creation network are presented. In addition, an improved service design process model was developed for Ford, to serve as a more structured foundation for using the building blocks and network. Through the use of the value co-creation building blocks and network the Ford team members are able to explore ideas for services in a multi-stakeholder context in practice. It gives room to multiple types of value, fitting with a multi-stakeholder context, and it balances value proposition, value co-creation and value capture from the exploratory phase onwards. Furthermore, the value co-creation network makes both the value proposition, value co-creation and value capture explicit. It thereby also provides a shared language and helps the team members to discuss the value that the new service concept co-creates and what Ford specifically could derive from that, to align with others.Strategic Product Desig