The service community is increasingly aware of the urgency of contributing to practice in ways that go beyond ensuring the survival of individual service firms and, instead, have their focus on the wellbeing of humanity and the planet. As a result, engaged scholarship that supports the design of sustainable service ecosystems is recognized as key service research priority. While many agree with this aim and are eager to get started, it is not clear how service researchers can practically contribute to the necessary transformation of complex service ecosystems. In the reconfiguring processes of service ecosystems, scholars are faced with highly dynamic situations that go beyond solving a single, clear-cut problem in isolation, toward attending to multiple, entangled conflicts, together with diverse and potentially highly polarized groups of stakeholders. Amid the significant challenge of this practical work, it is critical for the impact of this scholarly domain to translate insights about the nature and functioning of service ecosystems into practical guidelines to inform how transformational processes within such systems can be intentionally influenced.

To support service researchers in this critical effort, this hands-on workshop will engage participants in the “doing” of service ecosystem design. In other words, the workshop is designed to translate into practice the core insights from recent conceptual research on service ecosystem design—the intentional shaping of institutionalized social structures and their physical enactments by actor collectives through reflexivity and reformation to facilitate the emergence of desired value cocreation forms (Vink, Koskela-Huotari, Tronvoll, Edvardsson, & Wetter-Edman, 2021). The participants of the workshop will be introduced to several practical approaches to support service ecosystem design that they can apply both in their ongoing research and engaged efforts working with diverse service ecosystem actors in practice.

In particular, participants will learn the theory and practice connected with approaches for: 1) building actors’ reflexivity (the awareness of institutionalized social structures, including entrenched and shared norms, rules, roles, values and beliefs, internalized by oneself and others), and 2) supporting reformation (the intentional shaping of institutionalized social structures toward desired forms of cocreation). During the workshop, the participants will be applying these approaches in a practical case example focused on designing sustainable food systems. Participants will leave with inspiration on how they can leverage their role as service researchers to support the transformation of service ecosystems in practice and be introduced to a portfolio of approaches that they can tap into for working in a more practical way to intentionally influence complex service ecosystems toward more sustainable future trajectories.