Design and Engineering of the Experience. A new framework in the Operations and Technology Management.

The convergence of products into service and the growing dominance of the service economy is favored by the diffusion of the new digital technologies, which enables the so-called service industrialization. In the current scenario, where products and services converge, Marketing and Operations become closer and closer as well. Hence, the customers are really at the very center of the overall operations and competences, and designing a product-service combination, which can meet their expectations and even exceeding them, means to adopt a totally different perspective in the companies’ innovation process. It is essential, in short, to design the customer experience, because the tangible goods and the intangible service are, at the end of the day, its two main constituents. The first main outcome of my research is the trade-off between staff and customers, on the one hand, and between tangible and intangible components. The second main conclusion of my work is that, among the three major encounters we can identify in any product-service combination, the initial one and the final one require more attention to pay than usually done. The third conclusion of my work is that customer involvement is facilitated by the adoption of the new digital technology, this way enabling both the co-production and the socialization.