How do organizations create value for customers—and who actually creates that value, with whom?

As traditional boundaries between products and services disappear and we move from “services as non-goods” toward “everything as service,” this elective challenges the conventional view that firms create value and deliver it to customers. Instead, we treat service as a lens through which to understand how value is created, co-created, and captured regardless of industry.

We begin with the shift from Goods-Dominant Logic (Lens 1) to Service-Dominant Logic (Lens 2). Under Lens 1, value is embedded in products and services and delivered through exchange; under Lens 2, value emerges in use and context as resources from firms, customers, and other actors are integrated to accomplish customers’ Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). Taking JTBD as the North Star, we progressively expand the lens—from the firm, to the firm and customer together, to broader constellations of actors whose resources must be integrated for customers to get their jobs done.

From this perspective, service innovation is not simply about adding services or improving customer experience. It is about reconfiguring the mechanisms through which value is created, co-created, and captured—by changing who participates, the roles they play, the resources they contribute, and how those resources are integrated. We also examine complementary portfolio and stepwise approaches to shifting value-creation and value-capture logics across businesses and over time.

Across six weekly sessions—five content sessions followed by a session of live team presentations—we examine how firms design effective service systems; how customers become active co-creators of value; how multiple actors form value constellations around customer jobs; what happens when these systems fail and how recovery can restore value and trust; and how AI agents are beginning to participate as actors in their own right. As value creation becomes more distributed, we also explore the tension between control and trust—what organizations should own or control, what they should govern or enable, and what they should entrust to others. Throughout, we also ask when and where co-creation goes wrong: who captures the value that many actors help create, when useful interdependence becomes lock-in, whose job a constellation is really optimizing, and who bears the costs—now and later.

The course integrates case discussions, conceptual frameworks, hands-on exercises, and a group project in which students redesign a real service business by reconfiguring how value is created, co-created, and captured, and then present it live to the class in the final session.

Instructor: Yoshinori "Yoshi" Fujikawa

Course Date & Time

January 6, January 13, January 20, January 27, February 3, February 10; all sessions take place on Wednesdays, 14:00-17:00 CET