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They maintain that if the heart of each service is its value, a sustainable service has two values: its core value and the super value, which is co-created by the supplier and the customer. They cite as an example of a sustainable combination of self-service and super service the offering of free parking at the train station in order to encourage people to use their cars only to get to the train station. In addition, people could bring their bicycles onto the train for use in the city center.
Redefining sustainability as a service—by definition, an intangible product—shifts the focus from an economic profit point of view to one more concerned with environmental and social profits. It puts economics in this context, as an integral part of sustainability together with its environmental and social elements. Economics thereby dovetails with the holistic philosophy of Service Science, which focuses on the whole operation and not only on its economic aspects.
But services are not entities unto themselves. They need to fit into a system or a function that is activated. They exist in systems that take on an identity of their own from both a functional and cultural point of view.
Having looked at service and services from many different angles, we now go to the next phase in this primer on Service Science—that of service systems.