How strategic design abilities address unmet value in service engagement strategies

Purpose Engaging with customers and addressing unmet value have become increasingly challenging within multi-stakeholder environments of service innovation. Therefore, this paper aims to address this challenge by studying how strategic design abilities address unmet value in service engagement strategies. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a qualitative inductive study at a multinational corporation and interviewed marketing and design professionals on their innovation practices in service engagement strategies. Findings From the inductive analysis, this study identified three strategic design abilities that effectively contribute to addressing unmet value throughout the co-evolving process of service engagement: envisioning value, modelling value and engaging value. Based on this, this study proposes the emerging co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies. Research limitations/implications The limitation of this emerging theory is a lack of broad generalizability with mutual exclusivity or collective exhaustiveness across industries. A theoretical implication of the framework is the integration of strategic design and services marketing towards co-created engagement strategies. Practical implications The service engagement loop framework can be of great value to service innovation processes, for which an integrated, cross-functional approach is often missing. Social implications The findings further suggest that next to a methodological skillset, strategic design abilities consist of a distinct mindset. Originality/value This paper introduces strategic design abilities to address unmet value and proposes a novel co-evolving loop framework of service engagement strategies.