Joint service development – the creations of the prerequisite for the service development

Purpose The purpose of this study is to describe how parted or divided service development is carried out, where interactions and cooperation need to take place with other actors in order to create the foundations for the service, in the form of a coherent specification of the extended service concept. Design/methodology/approach This study builds empirically on an in‐depth longitudinal case‐study approach using data from a development project within the public transport sector. By the time this study is published, the phase that deals with the development of the system requirements and specifications will be in its final stages, while the next phase – the actual creation of the technology‐based systems and the test launch – will have been initiated. Findings In this study, three important groups of actors were identified. The first group, the information carriers, are the actors from the different organisations participating in the project who possess the important knowledge that should be tapped out and translated. The second group is the translators who are the ones that gather the knowledge from the other actors and interpret and translate this knowledge. In order to make this possible and to facilitate the process, the third group, the supporting actors or facilitators, plays an important role. Originality/value This study provides an alternative view of new service development from a knowledge transfer perspective, which is in contrast to the highly structured and sequenced models that have characterised most of the existing research on service development.