Agile New Service Development in an Interdisciplinary Context

Abstract

This article it shows the role of services in a highly interdisciplinary context: promoting cooperation between organizations in the life sciences industry and in the engineering and automation industry. It provides insights on how required offerings of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) are developed systematically based on a simple service engineering process model. In addition to the content-related view of new service development, findings from a meta-view are presented. Cooperating researchers and practitioners in the new-service development process observed their own collaboration and how the applied service engineering model had to be modified dynamically to the requirements of the use case. The results show that an easy-to-use service engineering model in a highly interdisciplinary context has benefits, but success is dependent on the joint efforts of an accordingly interdisciplinary team of engineers and natural scientists; a close communication with the customers both from the life sciences industry and the engineering and automation industry; and a more agile approach. The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information – we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.