Service Science and Sustainability

Service science is one of the interdisciplinary studies of service systems established in the early twenty-first century. It aims to tackle the value creation issues in complex systems with Service-Dominant Logic in human societies heavily affected by the interactive effects of technological innovation and social changes. The academic research paradigm shifts toward an engaged scholarship to encourage the iterative cycle of discovering issues faced in the real world and generating solutions to solve the problems, facilitating theory building and technology development. In this chapter, the service science discipline is elaborated and connects its research activities to achieve sustainability goals. A case study is used for explaining the issues, involved stakeholders, methods, and tools to attain sustainability. The major contribution of this case study is to position the emerging discipline of service science onto the important missions to achieve the sustainability of human societies by modelling the complexity of service ecosystems as actor-to-actor networks using Service-Dominant Logic and innovating service systems that sustain the value co-creation processes among different stakeholders (actors) including the natural environment. This case study results serve as an example that could inspire other practices in similar service ecosystems to realize their sustainability.