KISS: Background

Recent years have seen a phenomenal growth in knowledge intensive service activities across a variety of industry sectors. They depend on a continuous process of generation, acquisition and use of new information and knowledge or new combinations of existing information and knowledge to innovate and grow. The Knowledge Intensive Service Systems SIG will extend current research and analysis of practice in such systems. In particular, we will move beyond thinking of knowledge as a “thing” that can be narrowly defined by structures and ontologies. The aim is to build an improved understanding of knowledge as being co-created between consumers and producers, and through collaboration within communities.

Knowledge Intensive Services are part of a wider service system. A service system being “a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value.” Viewing services as systems allows us to study their structure, reason about their properties and behavior, understand their processes, and test their validity. In addition, thinking about services in terms of systems also forces us to consider their limitations and constraints, and their environments and contexts.

Services are often produced within a ‘service system’ that involves multiple suppliers of goods and services. In such systems, knowledge plays a central role; but we must also recognise the integral role of consumers, producers and other stakeholders in co-production of intermediate and final services, and in co-creating the knowledge required for the evolution and continuous innovation of the knowledge intensive service systems.