Translational Service Research And Design Methodology: What it is, What it is not, What it might be

Abstract

Translational Service Research and Design Methodology (TSRDM, (Warg et al., 2025)) addresses persistent translational gaps between rapidly growing scientific discoveries and their delayed, partial, or failed implementation in practice (Sung et al., 2003, Woolf, 2008). Although knowledge creation accelerates, implementation often lags behind, as observed across domains such as medicine, digital transformation, and sustainability (Jones, 2009, Vial, 2019). Grounded in the centrality of service (Spohrer et al., 2022), TSRDM advances a "unifying service language" that provides a higher-order, domain agnostic grammar for aligning research, design, engineering, and implementation. It reconceives the path from scientific discovery to real-world use as a service-based and ecosystemic journey rather than a linear handover between disciplines, and structures this journey as an eight-step process built around three pillars. TSRDM provides a robust translational framework for configuring steps, decisions, roles, services, flows, and relationships, thereby making translational gaps, frictions, linkages, and transitions visible as explicit design dimensions. This, in turn, aims to accelerate the overcoming of translational gaps and the implementation of service innovations that support sustainable human well-becoming.

Keywords: Translational Service Research And Design Methodology, Translational Gaps, Unifying Service Language

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007703