Can insights from the theory relating to ritual be operationalized to contribute to the development of New Service Development tools?

Service design must push its current boundaries of reference to incorporate wider impulses from the social sciences and humanities to allow for higher engagement at a socio-cultural level with service customers.

Services are primarily defined by their intangibility and temporal nature where value is co-created during service delivery between customer and service provider.

Rituals offer time-based structures that allow for the intangible to be made substantive and for the anxiety of change to be alleviated through performative rites.

This paper presents the initial attempts to operationalize theory relating to ritual as a way to create new user focused innovation tools for New Service Development (NSD) teams.

It presents the findings from a NSD workshop at Norway’s leading telecom company that tested newly developed tools generated through a research by design method of inquiry. The tools were applied to the development of additional services for ‘Digital Wallet’ technology in Norway.

The results suggest potential for ritual theory and the paper will discuss the findings and further research to be undertaken.

The research contributes to the Norwegian Centre for Service Innovation research program.