Malin Orebäck from Veryday highlights the importance of Service Design Thinking for Business Innovation by addressing Societal Challenges. Traditional business models aim to generate as much money as possible, without taking too much responsibility on what is happening in society or environment.

Watch a Vimeo Video about it.

Service Design Thinking explores alternative business models, where value creation is distributed across involved players. Putting the societal challenge at the center and creating new opportunity of shared value among stakeholders.

This kind of “Creating Shared Value” or “Shared Value Approach” requires an ecosystem with strong collaboration across involved stakeholders. Big complex issues (wicked problems) arising from societal opportunities are best solved by an ecosystem of solutions providing competitive advantage to all involved parties. From a Service Design Community perspective the next generation of business opportunities is widely masqueraded as societal problems and can be tackled by:

Traditional business needs to look at this challenges with a different lens. Revisiting the value chain and identifying gaps on it have been neglected till today. Engaging people on grass root level for collaboration and sustainability in new ways. This is a relevant topic in the design research community. Designers have to take a closer look at their role and how to increase societal impact by finding and facilitating new ways to set up Service Design business models.

One great quote Malin Orebäck presented is “It is a question of search strategy: If you are not taught to look systematically for win-win opportunities, you will only see trade-offs. Trade-offs seem to be “out there’, whereas win-win opportunities must be discovered – and created.” by Christoph Luetge and Benedikt von Liel, Financial Times.

I truly believe that traditional businesses have to anticipate dynamic markets of the 21st century. These markets are very much different from markets of the industrial revolution and mass production era. Companies have to reinvent their business model to survive; collaborating with their customers to discover, deliver and harvest sustainable societal shared value.