| Area of concern | The use of data to advance service is the area of concern. Section 2.1 describes some bodies of knowledge within the literature |
| Problem setting | Problem setting in action research represents people’s concerns in a problem situation. See Section 3.2 for the problem setting in the five projects |
| Conceptual framing | Considering that the research on data-use to advance service is at a nascent stage and is a truly interdisciplinary research topic, no single concept in the literature can sufficiently cover the full area of concern. The current work reviews and uses a wide range of studies through the five projects. See Sections 2.2 and 5 for reference |
| Method guiding the problem-solving cycle | The problem-solving cycle in action research focuses on producing practical outcomes. The literature on service design and NSD in Section 2.2 served as a basis to guide problem solving for project clients. See Figure 2 and Section 3.4 for the detailed service design processes |
| Method guiding the research cycle | The research cycle in action research focuses on producing research outcomes. See Figure 1 for our research cycle over five years. Our unique approach is to combine multiple projects of action research to generalize the findings |
| Contributions | Sections 4 and 5 present the practical and theoretical contributions of the current work. The contributions include understanding the area of concern, developing a basis for the conceptual framing for future research on using data to advance service (i.e. contribution to the literature in Section 2.1), and improving the method guiding the problem-solving cycle on using data to advance service (i.e. contribution to the literature in Section 2.2). In addition, the current work is significant in that it provides an action research case consisting of multiple projects and combines the service design and NSD literature with the action research literature |