Open Access

Sherif Ragab

• Industry 4.0 has created a wave of digitalization in all economic sectors. This has given rise to digital ecosystems that connect various stakeholders and allow for data capture and insights, which had previously been out of reach. Moreover, digitaliza-tion has led to an increased competition and an exponential rate of change in global markets across multiple industries. Faced with mounting pressure to differentiate themselves from the competition, companies seek to offer new digital databased services that provide greater customer value and make use of technological infra-structures. In the digital world, these services must fulfill various requirements in order to be successful and innovative. Among others, they require an agile devel-opment process from conception to market entry as well as the ability to quickly adapt to evolving customer needs. However, existing service design models lack the necessary flexibility and speed or do not fully consider the digital components of these kinds of services. This thesis aims to combine best practices in service design in order to present a holistic model that is best suited for developing digital data-based services. Accordingly, the research questions can be formed as such: Which exemplary best practice service design model allows companies to create innovative digital services? What are the requirements for such a model? DIN SPEC 33453 It should be noted that this thesis is part of a larger research project, Digivation, that aims to develop a standardized service design model under the title "DIN SPEC 33453: Smart Service Systems Engineering". As such, this thesis mirrors and tests the project's approach for the development of the new specification and serves as a reference for their findings. (cf. DIGIVATION 2018; DIN 2018) Thesis Outline To answer the research question, this thesis begins with a thorough examination of the theoretical foundations and literature on services and service design in chapter 2 Theoretical Foundations. This serves to develop an understanding of how ser-vices are defined and how service design models are structured and used. Addi-tionally, existing service design models are analyzed and compared. Moreover, fac-ets of digitalization and the digital economy are studied to contextualize service de-sign in the light of the new parameters dictating market conditions for new services. Chapter 3 Exploring the Future of Digital Service Design examines the different types of innovation and sets a definition for service innovation that can be applied throughout the thesis. Afterwards, best practices in service design are examined and collated into requirements for developing a new service design model. In chapter 4 Developing a Best Practice Approach, these requirements are used to identify and select four service design models that collectively reflect said requirements. These models are then evaluated to determine how they can best complement one another and are used as references for conceptualizing a new combined approach towards service design. The developed concept and requirements are then discussed and validated with industry experts. Finally, a new model is presented based on the ex-perts' feedback. Chapter 5 Conclusions provides a summary of the key findings and discusses them with an outlook on how they can be improved and expanded upon in future research.