Knowledge management in the design of innovative services systems

The evolution of the economic environment towards services orientation has introduced new challenges for companies. They attempt to design innovative services to support the value creation of their customer's business. In this context the knowledge is becoming a key matter for strategy and innovation. Many scholars have stressed the knowledge management approaches for the design of products. However services provide new issues which are linked to their own characteristics (e.g. intangibility, heterogeneity, coproduction). The methods and tools of knowledge management have to be adapted to the field of services design. Indeed it is important to acquire, represent and reuse the service-related knowledge which is tacit and co-created by providers, customers and others partners working together. Our work pursues the ongoing discussion of SSME (services science, management and engineering), an emergent discipline gathering the synergies around services science. It is also based on the example of a telecommunication operator which is trying to improve its methods to design services. Our approach is supported by a framework which describes services as services systems and a Web-based studio called SBCD (services browser for collaborative design). This paper gives an overview of this framework's main features (change of state, co-construction, business processes, services medium and access). Then it focuses on the role of knowledge in this context and proposes a knowledge acquisition method for the construction of an ontology to describe services systems.