Incorporating service design practice in service corporations for service innovation has been a rapid and popular development both in academic research and in professional practice in recent decades. However, a lack of understanding of corporate contexts in the service design discipline brings challenges in embedding the practice. It also leads to knowledge gaps in positioning the service design discipline for service innovation in corporate contexts.

This thesis starts by identifying the emergent contexts in which service design practice is happening. It then compares developments in practice and in theory to highlight the knowledge gaps in service design research, particularly regarding practice in the financial corporate sector. In addition, the review extracts current understanding of service design practice, in the context of innovation management, from design management literature so as to frame existing knowledge about corporate service innovation. Through synthesis, a set of research questions are generated to guide the research.

This was then followed by a participatory action research process. A bank in the UK was chosen as a field location. During the process of embedding service design practice into the bank, practice and projects were closely observed by the author of this thesis, and followed up with focus group discussion, semi-structured interviews with participants and data collection. Then thematic analysis was applied to analyse the data and to identify new findings in response to the research questions.

As a result, the research generated a contextual framework for embedding service design practice for service innovation in system firms. In addition, the research highlighted the challenges facing service designers at each level of this process of incorporation.