Development of a service evolution map for service design through application of text mining to service documents

As digital convergence has proliferated and products have become smarter, various service concepts have emerged based on the capabilities of products. It has become a main concern to illuminate historical changes and status of service concepts according to the utilisation of product elements to provide valuable information for service development. However, a lacuna still remains in the literature regarding a systematic and quantitative approach on this problem. This study proposes a service evolution map as a tool for analysing the evolutionary paths of service concepts based on the utilisation of product elements. The proposed service evolution map consists of two layers with the time dimension: a product element layer for the utilisation of product elements and a service concept layer for the evolutionary paths of service concepts. Based on the service documents describing what the services are, text mining, co-word analysis, and modified formal concept analysis are employed to develop the product element and service concept layers, respectively. A case study of mobile application services is presented to illustrate the proposed approach. This study is expected to be a basis of future research on the interaction between products and services and service concept design based on the creative utilisation of product elements.