iInteriorDesign: a collaborative service system approach towards constructive value co-creation

Abstract

There is an increasing demand toward an innovative knowledge-intensive service industry in global business. In particular, the soaring research area of service science, management, and engineering (SSME) emphasizes how people and technology can be effectively aligned to achieve value co-creation between service providers and customers through systematic service innovation. In order to address the problem of the systematic service innovation, this study proposes a machine-metaphor and adaption-metaphor approach to constructing collaborative service system (CSS) which can automate value co-creation experiences using facilitating (or assisting, mediating) the service operation management and improve service productivity and satisfaction. This machine-metaphor approach comprises two parts: simple service machine (SSM) and intelligent service machine (ISM), in which the notion of machines aims at significantly effectuates the productivity in the emergent service/experience economy. In this study, we develop a CSS application: iInteriorDesign that illustrates how a CSS application of innovative knowledge-intensive interior design service can be developed using SSM and ISM. Due to the requirements with massive communications to assure the customers` needs in the interior design service, iInteriorDesign use adaption-metaphor (co-evolutionary technology) to provide the effective decision support on the extraction of the significant interior-design attributes (e.g., romantic, luxurious, etc.) and the optimization of the interior-design concept style selection (e.g., victorian style, minimal & luxury etc.) with a concept style ontology (of the concept style properties like Region, Era, Category, Climate, and Culture) within the interior design services. iInteriorDesign provides a platform that the service participants joint efforts to determine the ideal concept styles of interior design to meet the customer`s needs over Internet. Further, the study adopts the Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) to evidence if the symbiotic interdependence relationship building can expedite the value co-creation. This study also proposes `Symbiotic Service Model` based on the RDT to contribute the service innovation research.