Designing a service science discipline with discipline

This paper relates our experiences at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), designing a service science discipline. We wanted to design a discipline of service science in a principled and theoretically motivated way. We began our work by asking, “What questions would a service science have to answer?” and from that we developed a new framework for understanding service science. This framework can be visualized as a matrix whose rows are stages in a service life cycle and whose columns are disciplines that can provide answers to the questions that span the life cycle. This matrix systematically organizes the issues and challenges of service science and enables us to compare our model of a service science discipline with other definitions and curricula. This analysis identified gaps, overlaps, and opportunities that shaped the design of our curriculum and in particular a new survey course that serves as the cornerstone of service science education at UC Berkeley.