Sustainability and Service

The service sector has undergone explosive growth in recent years, and today it is the largest sector of the economy. One channel through which the goal of sustainability can be achieved, therefore, is through the design of more sustainable services. In general, there are several different routes to imbue services with sustainability, from the rational use of resources to more efficient value co-creation processes to propositions of the same solution in an alternative, sustainable manner. Ecosystem services, which are nature’s services that support and maintain life on earth, can be mimicked by a variety of service types and modes. These include environmental services that specialize in the minimization of environmental damage, green services that promote more efficient resource use and smaller environmental impacts, and eco-efficient services that are marketable systems of products and services capable of fulfilling a user’s demand more sustainably. All service types and modes can be gathered under the umbrella of clean services (CleanServs), i.e., services that are competitive with, if not superior to, their conventional tangible or intangible counterparts and that reduce the use of natural resources and cut or eliminate emissions and wastes while increasing the responsibilities of both provider and customer. Finally, a sustainable service—which imbues the service’s core-value with sustainability but that also requires the customer to become a provider of sustainability to current and future generations via the production and delivery of sustainable super-value—provides a framework for sustainability-based service innovation.