Service Systems Design: An Intentional Agent Perspective Lysanne Lessard and Eric Yu Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada Abstract This article proposes to conceptualize service system entities as intentional agents in order to account for the high-level interests and expected benefits that drive their interactions. Such a conceptualization offers a useful ground for the design of service systems through agent-oriented modeling, in particular i ∗ (short for distributed intentionality). i ∗ could provide an improved support to the design of service system interactions by focusing on why actors engage in service relationships and how they evaluate the value of a service engagement. Such an approach goes beyond current process-based design approaches that support the design of service activities but that are unable to link them to actors’ perception of value. We develop our argumentation from the results of a multiple-case study of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), in particular academic research and development service engagements. C  2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Keywords: Intentional agents; Agent-oriented modeling; i ∗ ; Service systems design; Value cocreation; KIBS 1. INTRODUCTION This article proposes to conceptualize service system entities as intentional agents. The concept of ser- vice systems has been developed as part of service- dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2008). A service system is commonly described as a collection of special- ized resources (people, technology, information, etc.) organized in a manner that enables a service system en- tity to cocreate value with entities offering other spe- cialized resources (Spohrer, Maglio, Bailey, & Gruhl, 2007; Vargo, Maglio, & Akaka, 2008). A service sys- tem comprises at least two entities (in particular, a provider and a client) and the target of the service Correspondence to: Lysane Lessard, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G6 Canada. e-mail: lysanne.lessard@utoronto.ca Received: 30 August 2011; revised 6 February 2012; accepted 2 April 2012 View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hfm DOI: 10.1002/hfm.20513 to be accomplished through their interaction (Gadrey, 2002). Because service systems are able to adapt to their environments and dynamically organize their re- sources, they have been characterized as complex adap- tive networks (Lusch, Vargo, & Wessels, 2008). They have also been characterized as social systems since they evolve in social contexts that frame the relation- ships between actors (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2010). We apply the concept of service system entities to actors—people, organizations, partnerships—that in- teract in the context of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS); we focus on academic research and development (R&D) services as one type of KIBS. This work is part of a multiple-case study of academic R&D services that aims to identify their main mechanisms of value creation. S-D logic and its associated con- cepts, in particular service systems and value cocre- ation (Vargo & Lusch, 2008), offer a new perspective on KIBS. Indeed, KIBS have traditionally been investi- gated as a type of firm or industry (Muller & Doloreux, 2009). But S-D logic enables us to understand KIBS Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries 00 (0) 1–8 (2012) c  2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1