"My congratulations to Lucy Kimbell on the new Service Innovation Handbook. She managed to make a very attractive and content-rich book that makes the lifes of teachers in innovation a lot easier. I will recommend the handbook to our master students in our School of Design in Hong Kong. Furthermore, I will recommend the book to practitioners in the services industry. Hong Kong is all about services, in particular in finance and hospitality, and we desperately need more service innovation. This handbook really is a practical guide that has the potential to generate lot’s of minor and major breakthroughs that will structurally change the landscape of the services industry. Since this will be done from a human-centred perspective, we will all benefit."
- Professor Cees de Bont, Dean, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

“Lucy Kimbell’s Service Innovation Handbook offers different value than most popular texts on service design. Like classics in the field like This is Service Design Thinking or Experience Design,  Kimbell grounds the book in rich case studies and particular how-to methods, including templates and worked examples. But what differentiates Kimbell’s text is that she prefaces the case studies and methods sections with solid, rich evidence-based introductions to the theory and research underlying service innovation. In particular, Kimbell doesn’t shy away from addressing service-dominant logic, boundary objects, or progressive approaches to outcomes and assessment.
Another useful feature of the book is that it focuses on the very front end of service innovation. It shares some similarity to Terry Pinheiro’s The Service Startup:Design Gets Lean, but Kimbell’s methods are more thoughtfully interconnected and less complex. Like the dSchool’s Make Space, Kimbell’s methods include how-to equipment, but she also included a work example for a sample case that threads throughout the text.
Kimbell’s blend of theory, cases, and methods is a key strength and reminds me of Sam Ladner’s Practical Ethnography or Andrew Hinton’s Understanding Context.
But a copy for your methods shelf and one to share with design clients who want to go all in.”
- David Rubeli, learning designer and educational consultant on hisblog