| Roles | The roles of researchers and practitioners were clarified in the contract phase of any project. Researchers generally performed all problem diagnosis, data gathering, data analysis, action planning, action taking, and action evaluation, whereas practitioners support these steps and evaluated the outcomes |
| Documentation | The quality of data used in the project was ensured through the presentation of the data collector and evaluation of the other party. For example, the researchers evaluated the quality of vehicle operations and accident data collected by the practitioners in Project 2. On the contrary, the researchers interviewed experts for data collection, and the practitioners evaluated the results in Project 4. Consequently, poor data were excluded after the evaluation in any project |
| Control | The contract between the research team and client organization established the researcher-client relationship. The organization funded the research. Thus, the organization executive and principle investigator exercised authority over the project process. Practitioners controlled the problem-solving cycle through regular meetings for evaluation |
| Usefulness | The practitioners and researchers evaluated usefulness of the planned actions. Practitioners mainly measured short-term usefulness for their own problems (i.e. specificity), whereas the researchers were concerned about long-term usefulness for academic findings (i.e. generality) |
| Theory | Phenomenological studies on using data to advance service (e.g. studies in Section 2.1) provided a theoretical basis to the current work. The literature on service design and NSD (e.g. studies in Section 2.2) provided a methodological basis. The integrated findings in Sections 4 and 5 contribute theoretically to understanding of data-use for service advancement and to facilitating the service design and development with (big) data |
| Transfer | These findings can be transferred or adapted in many other contexts. The five projects were combined mainly to achieve generality of findings. In addition, we applied these findings to other projects to test transferability; see the last paragraph of Section 3.3 |