Exploring the Role of Service Design in IoT-Enabled Servitization and Healthcare 4.0

In the emerging ‘Industry 4.0’ and ‘Healthcare 4.0’ paradigms, healthcare technology manufacturers can benefit from exploring IoT-enabled servitization as a means to gain a competitive advantage, create new revenue streams and strengthen customer relationships. However, to achieve successful service innovation in healthcare, companies must obtain a deep understanding of customer needs, and the context for which they are designing. Service design is seen as a human-centered approach to service innovation, that may be especially relevant to designing for healthcare. However, at the time of this thesis, few practice-based studies had been carried out to explore service design’s role in IoT-enabled servitization for Healthcare 4.0. This research aimed to bridge this gap, by deploying a Research Through Design (RTD) approach, to a case provided by the healthcare device manufacturer esense. In this research, service design tools and methods were deployed to involve key stakeholders in the research process of a novel Product-Service System (PSS) proposal, anchored in customer insights. It was found that service design was an effective approach to help manufacturers switch from a product-oriented perspective, towards a customer-centric one. This research provides an example of how service design can be implemented by manufacturing companies who are taking their first steps towards IoT-enabled servitization.