Abstract
Today, enterprises have to be customer and service oriented in order to adapt themselves to a more and more competitive and evolving context. Their innovators (actors of the innovation) have to collaborate in order to anticipate the customers' needs. To do so, they work as a virtual team (a remote and inter-professional network) and try to describe services situations, to detect lacks and opportunities, and to propose the design of adapted solutions. Based on the service literature and the discussions of the Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) discipline, we conceive the service as a dynamic configuration of heterogeneous entities: a “Service System”. We then suggest formalizing it with a mereological ontology (collective classes instead of distributive classes) of processual entities (processes instead of substances) in order to highlight its dynamic dimension. The Service System acts as an intermediary object aiming at the innovators' cooperation and creativity during a co-design phase. Its modelling reveals all the possible experiences within a situation through the identification of the relationships between processual entities. A co-modelling process and a web-based tool are currently tested upstream of the services design process of a French telecom operator. This operator's process and experiments are good examples.
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