Our research group "Digital Service Innovation" (DSI) is focusing on designing, developing, and evaluating novel digital services and service business models based on the use of data and AI. Established in 2008 in cooperation with IBM, we build on a proven "industry-on-campus" concept bringing industry experience to KIT - and put a particular emphasis on connecting theory and practical application. We are part of both the Institute for Information Systems (WIN) as well as the interdisciplinary Karlsruhe Digital Service Research & Innovation Hub (KSRI).

Our conviction

We strongly believe that digitalization will radically transform the way value is generated for businesses and individuals and drive the "servitization" of businesses. Information and communication technology will be the "glue" for service systems in which several partners cooperate to jointly create value. In a business context, this means that innovation concepts have to elevate above the scope of the single enterprise and comprise customers, partners, or whole ecosystems.

Our focus

We are fascinated by the opportunitities that digitalization holds for service innovation. Our research focuses on concepts, methods and tools to design novel services and entire business models. At the same time, we run an integrated teaching and training concept within the KSRI to educate future leaders for a global, services-led world. Based on a solid understanding of service systems, students are developing economic and technical competences essential to successfully engineer and manage IT-based services. Courses are usually taught in English.

Our expertise

We specialize in analyzing and designing user-centric and IT-based services and evaluating them in practice – while tightly connecting business and technology. Our current research is organized in two labs – in which we add interdisciplinary and domain expertise from other KSRI groups and partners.

• Digital Service Design & Innovation: We design and investigate methods, tools, and strategies for the innovation of sustainable, human-centered digital services. Our research addresses two core challenges: enabling data ecosystems for value co-creation and driving digital innovation in organizations. We explore data sharing strategies, circular economy platforms, IoT-based business models, and AI-enabled orchestration of service ecosystems. At the same time, we develop practitioner-oriented toolkits, study the transformation of work and engagement through digital technologies, and prototype multi-agent AI systems to accelerate innovation.

• Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Services: We focus on the development of applied AI methods that support effective human-AI collaboration in service contexts. Our research covers the full lifecycle of AI, from data acquisition and understanding to the design and deployment of (multi-modal) AI systems. A central topic is managing and communicating uncertainty in AI-driven decision-making to foster trust and transparency. We study how human knowledge can be embedded into interactive systems and explore how generative AI combined with explainable AI techniques can enhance the AI adoption and interpretability.

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