The peculiar nature of services requires a multidisciplinary approach to investigate on their impact in the economic growth, to define models, to identify terminology, to describe scenarios and user profiles. The integration of several disciplines is a key point for the improvement of the Service Science capacity to find solutions and answers for services, especially for studying and designing new ICT services, the fastest growing segment within the service sector.

One of the main goals of this paper is to analyse the existing relationships among SSME and ICTs, focusing on the potential of Web 2.0 and in general of collaborative technologies which can enable and foster innovation in the service sector. Such technologies innovate both the service development process and the design phases. We show the role of Web 2.0 tools in the value co-production activities carried out by both service providers and customers. The collaborative technologies play an important role in services focusing on knowledge and information management because they promote customer involvement and foster knowledge sharing. We introduce a pattern describing the role of collaborative tools in co-production processes starting from the analysis of Wikipedia [30] as an example of Web 2.0 service. The pattern helps customer to interact during the service development process.

The paper is structured as follows: section II analyses the state of the art of the main topic discussed as well as service development research. Section III illustrates how Web 2.0 tools can support the co-production process in the streamline of the Wikipedia case study, and a summary of co-production

concepts is proposed; in section IV the pattern just mentioned and its applications are discussed using a service classification framework as found in literature. Section V presents the conclusions and foreseeable future developments.

II. SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
The remarkable development of the service sector induced the international scientific community and companies to design academic courses in Service Science [6][24] giving rise to a new academic curricula known as “Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME)”
1. This new specific discipline is evolving to scientifically study services and their role in the changing economy, and courses are aimed at shaping expertise in the inherent topics.

A. Service definitions
The service concept is dynamic and evolves in time mainly given its close relation with the evolving states of economy and
technology. There are many definitions of service in the literature, but there is not yet an exhaustive one. Some well known definitions are, for example:
• A time-perishable, intangible experience performed for a customer acting in the role of co-producer [9].
• A change in condition or state of an economic entity (or thing) caused by another [15].
• A value that can be rented (in the broad sense) by the application of some process that the renter (client) participates in. This is a contrast with goods, whose value (once purchased) is owned by the customer [22].

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