Platform Design for Services The use of design platforms in Service Design

This thesis is about the development of a service platform for a social cooperative based in Turin. The project stemmed from a consultancy contract between the social cooperative Stranaidea s.c.s. and the Department of Production Engineering and Management of Politecnico di Torino (DIGEP). The principal investigator has been Francesca Montagna, Associate Professor of Innovation Management and Product Development at the DIGEP, who has worked together with Master student and author of this thesis Giovanni Marco Losi. Creating a platform proved to be pivotal both to address innovative approaches to service design to be integrated in the cooperative’s established practices and to foster changes in the management and organizational structure of the cooperative. Starting from a general request of flexibility coming from Stranaidea’s management, the work has been divided in two main parts. The first part was a research one, presented in Chapters 2 and 3, in which product and service design methods have been reviewed in order to select the ones that appeared most consistent with the work that had to be done. The first area that has been treated is about the intrinsic characteristics of services, starting from the concept of service itself. Then, the applicability to services of concepts such as product architecture and modularity has been studied in order to verify whether the request for flexibility expressed by management could be addressed with methods adopted in product-oriented environments. The study indicated that the platform is a preferential method to ensure flexibility also in a service oriented context, confirming what was taught during the first meeting with Stranaidea’s management. The second part of the work, presented in Chapter 4, consisted in the application of such a method to the specific case of Stranaidea. At first, the information needed to carry out a rigorous analysis were gathered through interviews with service managers, in order to preserve the human factor fundamental to the cooperative. Then, the information was analysed with powerful tools such as sector matrices, modularization function and adjacency matrices. Once the final results were obtained, an additional step was taken in order to introduce to the whole cooperative how the platform could impact on the organizational structure.