Shortly before the SDN’s Global Conference in late 2014, news broke that Capital One was to acquire Adaptive Path. It was a hot topic during coffee breaks in our Stockholm venue, and within the wider worlds of service design and UX design.

For decades, designers have lamented that the business world didn’t understand or respect design. We howled didn’t have ‘a seat at the table’. We wondered when – or if – the tide would turn.

Traditionally, design consultants have been viewed as experts who meet needs beyond their clients’ skill set. Time, budget, and predefined deliverables drive the designer-client relationship. In the end, the designer presents a recommendation and the job is complete. When a new need arises, the consultant returns. This approach results in design dependence.

Austrian healthcare provider PremiQaMed decided to sharpen its competitive edge by providing an outstanding patient experience on top of reliable medical quality. In 2008, the company decided to invest in a permanent service design unit within the head office of its five private clinics.

After graduating from university, I got a job as an intern in a product design consultancy. This was, after all, what I had trained for and I was grateful for the opportunity to do some real work with a team of experienced designers.

Design agencies and in-house design teams can do more together than either can do on its own. How they do this exactly, depends on the type of organisation and project. Though individual designers may prefer working for one or the other, our industry should focus on spreading and evolving service design as a whole, as we are still a relatively new field.

Despite the growing interest in service design within companies, managers often question what difference it makes and how to measure the results. Is it worth investing in? This article shares Nordea’s Savings and Wealth Offerings practical experiences.

This article describes the stages and outcomes of a programme to embed service design capabilities within Mind, the mental health charity, and its federated network of over 140 local organisations.

What does it mean for a service designer to work for an independent, mid-size design agency or an in-house design agency that is part of a large management consultancy? Having worked in both environments, here is my perspective.

Five years ago, Shropshire Council in the UK took its first steps towards creating an in-house service design team to help them think differently about the challenges they faced.

When Capital One acquired Adaptive Path in October 2014, the service design community took notice. Was this the end of service design as we know it? Or the beginning of a new era?

What happens when three designers share their mistakes, stories and insights from their different industry experiences?

Does it really make sense to build an internal service design competence? Will the effort, time and money invested bring a genuine benefit for the company? Is it a better solution building it in-house instead of buying it from a consultancy?

I’m going to talk about a story of perseverance. While I was thinking about the topic of this article, I went to the monthly meet-up of Service Design Drinks Madrid to get some inspiration. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the topic was 'In-house Service Designers versus Service Design Consultants'.

Rêve Consulting is a strategy and service design consultancy located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a state that is home to one of the highest number of Fortune 500 companies per capita in the United States.

Service design was entirely unknown at E.ON. However, after initially being met with scepticism, service design soon became a standard component of the company’s culture.

The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework has been in use by innovation consultants for a few years now. Yet only recently has it started gaining broader momentum, being adopted in areas of design. After applying various JTBD tools at Nokia since 2013, we are able to integrate them with our familiar service design methods, improving and extending them.

What is the impact of silos in large multinational corporations with multiple divisions, worldwide offices and multiple product lines? How often have we found ourselves in a situation where there are breakdowns in communication, cooperation and coordination between different teams and stakeholders?

In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint publisher Prof. Birgit Mager speaks with Haruo Oba, the General Manager of the Sony Corporation Creative Center B2B Design Department. He started introducing service design to Sony in 2010.