Virtual Communities in a Services Innovation Context: A Service Science and Mereotopology Based Method and Tool
Résumé
This chapter focuses on both the activities of the telecoms’ innovators (i.e. actors of the innovation) and the emergence of some “service communities” which are interesting facets of virtual communities. These innovators are part of a remote and inter-professional network which forms a “design community”. They are involved in the telecom operators’ design process (opportunities research, service design, development, deployment and market launch). During the first stage, this community has to describe customers’ services situations, discover lacks and opportunities and find some ideas of adapted solutions. Theoretical and professional difficulties have been noted during this key step. The main problem is related to the concept of service which is a multidimensional and still poorly understood object. Based on the service literature and the emergent field of Service Science, we propose a theoretical framework and a semi-formal semantic method to describe, co-model (through a mereotopological ontology of assembled and interconnected scenes) and simulate (through an animation of each scenario) the targeted Services Systems. These Services Systems are configurations of dynamic/processual entities that reveal not only the service field of experiences but also the actors’ performances within different spatiotemporal situations.