This paper aims to bridge recent work on Service Logic with practice and research in the Design for Service to explore whether and how human-centered collaborative design approaches could provide a source for interpreting existing service systems and proposing new ones and thus realize a Service Logic in organizations. A comparison is made of existing theoretical backgrounds and frameworks from Service Logic and Design for Service studies that conceptualize core concepts for value co-creation: actors, resources, resource integration, service systems, participation, context, and experience.

We find that Service Logic provides a framework for understanding service systems in action by focusing on how actors integrate resources to co-create value for themselves and others, whereas Design for Service provides an approach and tools to explore current service systems as a context to imagine future service systems and how innovation may develop as a result of reconfigurations of resources and actors. Design for Service also provides approaches, competences, and tools that enable involved actors to participate in and be a part of the service system redesign. Design for value co-creation is presented using this model.

The paper builds on and extends the Service Logic research first by repositioning service design from a phase of development to Design for Service as an approach to service innovation, centered on understanding and engaging with customers' own value-creating practices. Second, it builds on and extends through discussing the meaning of value co-creation and identifying and distinguishing collaborative approaches for the generation of new resource constellations. In doing so, the collaborative approaches allow for achieving value co-creation in designing.