Conference article

With service design taking increasingly strategic and transformational roles, effective organizational partnership and engagement has become crucial. However, since organizational communities are structured and function differently from social communities, participatory service innovation methods like co-design need to take additional factors and different strategies into account for effective engagement and participation in these settings. We draw from discussions in organizational studies to highlight challenges with regards to engagement in innovation processes within and across communities in organizations. Further, we look at knowledge brokers, a concept that features prominently in discourse in this area and outline it theoretically and through a strategy of application in co-design settings. Hence, we contribute to the current service design discourse by adding insights to both theory and practice. Finally, we describe the application of this strategy in two exploratory case studies with differing scales in terms of both the service being designed and the nature of participation from organizational communities.

service design, knowledge brokers, co-design, design legacies, organizational studies