Service Development as Action Design Research: Reporting on a Servitized E-Recruiting Portal

In this paper we reflect retrospectively on an e-recruiting service design and development project action design research. The project itself pre-dated the publication of the Action Design Research Method by Sein, Henfridsson et al., (2011). When viewed as action design research, we find that many of the principles of ADR, such as defining the problem as an instance of a class of problem, practice inspired research, mutually influential roles and guided emergence are not only synergistic with service design, but in fact, the effective design of services embeds and requires a similar approach. To this extent, we considered ADR to be an appropriate choice for services research, development and implementation at the nexus of theory and practice. We further identified some extensions and elaborations to the ADR method in a service development context. In particular, we posit that guided emergence occurs between the theoretical foundations of a service project and the artefact development, as well as between the artefact development and the organizational context. We find that in a multi-disciplinary project, theoretical contributions may be emergent, and multiple theoretical contributions are possible using a range of different lenses. We also identify some practical difficulties with reporting the learning from service development projects. Overall, we found that ADR was likely to be a highly appropriate approach for framing and deriving learning from innovative service design projects, but may require further enhancement.