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and secondly illustrates it by the case of a specific Assessment and Improvement
integrated Approach developed by CRPHT. A particular attention is paid on stan-
dardization aspects in Luxembourg and at an international level.
In fact, in 2003, a research project (AIDA, standing for Assessment and Improve-
ment integrated Approach) was defined in order to develop an IT Service Management
(ITSM) framework for assessing ITSM processes. The innovative ideas of the project
were born from many issues in companies where the need for improving ITSM proc-
esses appeared but there was a lack of an objective and repeatable approach for assess-
ing processes and a lack of a very structured improvement path. Moreover, similar
approaches combining the improvement of software development processes and ITSM
ones were missing. In CRPHT, the ISO/IEC 15504 standard has been studied and used
since the mid-nineties for assessing software processes (and using the assessment results
for improvement programmes). From the year 2003, the ISO/IEC 15504 [6] has been
revised as a generic process assessment standard [7]. It was then possible to assess any
kind of process, in any company whatever the activity sector. At the same time the IT
Infrasctructure Library (ITIL®) de facto standard was developing quickly and rising
more and more interest in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Then the combined use of
both standards became a research objective. The AIDA research project aimed at devel-
oping a common approach for IT process assessment and improvement [8][9][10]. From
now on the AIDA research framework has been renamed as TIPA: Tudor's IT service
management Process Assessment. We will now describe our service innovation design
process before to illustrate it by this specific innovation.
2 A Service Innovation Management Model
Based on its practices (mainly action researches, further developed in [11]) the Centre
for IT Innovation (CITI) department of CRPHT has developed and is now using a
global sustainable service innovation process to support the management of innovation
processes: the “Sustainable Service Innovation Process” (S2IP). It is based on a partici-
patory and collaborative innovation approach in order to sustain deep involvement of
the network's actors in the development of innovation services. Those services are dedi-
cated to businesses (i.e. process-oriented such as e.g. security management services), to
IT-oriented services (such as e.g. tourist information geo-localized mobile access ser-
vices) and to Human Resources IT-related skills (such as e.g. consultancy services in
SME). The overall structure of S2IP is depicted on the figure 1.
Although the figure may suggest that the S2IP is lifecycle oriented, the reality is
that each box corresponds to a process by itself that has to be performed and may be
pursued in parallel with other processes in a non strict sequence. In accordance with
Van de Ven & al (1999) [12], we apprehend innovation in a process perspective as a
non-linear dynamic system, which implies several sense-making activities. Our re-
search on the definition of actors, activities, skills and competences mobilized in the
S2IP is directly contributing to the body of knowledge developed in the new research
domain of Service Science [13].