Views on implementation and how they could be used in service design

Although service designers have proven their abilities in the fuzzy front end of service development, their skills regarding implementation have been criticised and many service designs are not implemented successfully. So far, there has been little discussion concerning service implementation in service design research and there is potential for further development of this aspect of the design of services. This paper intends to contribute to this development by presenting different views on implementation from fields that are related to service design, such as product and interaction design. These fields mostly see implementation as the delivery of generic resources and process models, whereas service implementation (also) involves development and change of the (service) organisation as well as adaptation in use of resources and service processes models. Still, if discussions on implementation in these related fields are translated to a service context, they can provide inspiration for (future research on) service implementation.