Rethinking value beyond growth: Designing services for people and the planet

Modern economies have been built on a growth-oriented model, where success is measured by continuous growth, ever-increasing productivity, and maximizing profit. However, as environmental and societal challenges intensify, this model is being increasingly questioned. At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Professor Kunio Shirahada is rethinking this approach, exploring how value can be created in more sustainable and meaningful ways. “My work explores how humans can identify what truly matters, create meaningful value, and guide society toward a better future,” he explains.

Prof. Shirahada takes his inspiration from “satoyama,” a Japanese concept that describes traditional rural landscapes where human life and nature exist in close harmony. In these environments, communities do not simply extract resources but actively maintain relationships with the natural world.

“In satoyama, people do not simply extract resources from nature; rather, they engage in ongoing relationships that sustain both human livelihoods and ecological systems,” says Prof. Shirahada.

Rethinking value through Human Wisdom
At JAIST, Prof. Shirahada's research centers on a concept he calls “Human Wisdom Science,” which incorporates the human capacity to interpret meaning, make ethical judgments, and envision desirable futures.

Using this perspective, his research asks a fundamental question: How can we identify what truly matters and guide society toward a better future? This means moving beyond the traditional focus on efficiency and customer satisfaction to explore how services can improve people's overall quality of life, including their well-being, personal growth, and harmony with the world around them.

Transformative Service Research: From performance to wellbeing
To answer the question, Prof. Shirahada's team at the Laboratory on Management for Sustainability has pioneered Transformative Service Research (TSR), where the focus shifts from short-term performance to long-term wellbeing.

“While traditional service research has often focused on efficiency, customer satisfaction, or profitability, TSR asks a more fundamental question: how can services help people live better lives?” he elaborates. “It considers not only economic value, but also psychological, social, and even environmental wellbeing.”

Co-creating value with nature
Much like the philosophy of satoyama, Prof. Shirahada’s work emphasizes value co-creation, where value is not just measured through monetary benchmarks but is jointly created among three parties: service providers, beneficiaries, and the natural environment. He refers to this as a “tripartite value co-creation framework.”

“When nature is included as a co-creator, we can design systems where economic, social, and environmental values reinforce each other,” he explains. “It becomes a win–win–win relationship.”

He illustrates this concept through the example of beekeeping: “Bees contribute to pollination, which supports ecosystems and agricultural productivity, while humans provide care, protection, and suitable environments for the bees to thrive. Value is thus created not only between humans, but through this interconnected relationship that includes nature.”

This perspective challenges conventional economic thinking and opens doors to regenerative and sustainable systems.

“SenTan” Edge: Understanding value through human experience and technology
To design services that foster this deep engagement, his laboratory is developing practical methods to study and apply these ideas. This includes using AI to augment human judgment and even studying how our brains respond to meaningful service experiences.

“Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human decision-making, we explore how it can collaborate with humans to enhance collective intelligence and support wiser decision-making processes,” says Prof. Shirahada.

Using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to observe brain activity, his team has found that when a service or message resonates personally, the prefrontal cortex lights up, not just due to attention but from deep, personal engagement. “It means that effective services are not just informative or efficient; they must connect with the user's personal context,” he emphasizes, demonstrating a scientific pathway for measuring the experience of meaning.

Collaborations across industry, government, and academia
This shift requires a fundamental change in perspective. “We need to change our long-standing assumptions about human dominance over natural systems to a more relational and responsible way of thinking,” asserts Prof. Shirahada. “Such a change can only be achieved through global collaboration involving diverse stakeholders. By examining value creation across different cultural and institutional contexts, we can develop theories that are both context-sensitive and globally relevant.”

His work, exploring how to redefine service systems and address contemporary challenges, has connected him with researchers across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This includes studying how Japanese companies are transitioning to circular business models and how service systems can integrate ethical considerations, stakeholder dialogue, and long-term responsibility.

“In a recent study, we found that companies do not transition to circular economy models through a single pathway. Instead, they engage in what we call dual-servitization—the simultaneous development of two interconnected service transformations,” elaborates Prof. Shirahada. “The first is product-oriented servitization, where firms enhance their offerings by adding services such as maintenance, monitoring, or lifecycle support. The second is circular-oriented servitization, where firms redesign their business models to enable reuse, recycling, and resource circulation.”

Interestingly, the transformations do not occur in a mutually independent manner; instead, they interact and reinforce one another. For instance, providing lifecycle support services enables firms to have better control over product use and recovery, which is essential for circular strategies, and circular initiatives in turn help create new service opportunities.

One notable collaboration is with Professor Raymond Fisk at Texas State University, where they developed the tripartite value co-creation framework, which challenges the conventional view of nature as a mere resource and instead positions it as an active partner.

Beyond academia, Prof. Shirahada's work extends into industry and the public sectors. He collaborates with multinational companies, such as Hitachi and Bridgestone, as well as municipalities to bring these service systems into practice.

“Instead of providing abstract strategy models, we sit together with managers, engineers, and frontline staff to map out future value creation across several layers, such as market trends, service concepts, technologies, and organizational capabilities,” he explains.

Through this practical approach, he has helped manufacturing firms transition toward service-oriented business models where technology, customer experience, and sustainability goals evolve together.

Shaping future leaders in sustainability
For students passionate about making a real-world impact, Prof. Shirahada offers a clear vision: “For students considering research in our department, I would say that this is a place for those who want to engage with real-world challenges while developing rigorous academic thinking.”

Students in his research group come from diverse backgrounds, and the research is highly interdisciplinary across management, information science, and materials science. Students participate in intensive research camps that provide them with hands-on, real-world experience.

“Through these experiences, students can expect to develop three key capabilities: the ability to think systemically about complex problems, the skill to translate ideas into practical solutions, and the mindset to contribute to society through research,” says Prof. Shirahada.

JAIST as a supportive research environment
The institute provides an environment Prof. Shirahada considers to be uniquely suited for this kind of open, interdisciplinary, and action-oriented work. With its strong emphasis on integration, JAIST encourages collaboration across fields such as management, information science, and engineering.

“For me, this environment sparked a genuine motivation to connect fields like marketing, neuroscience, technology management, and sustainability science,” says Prof. Shirahada. “For example, understanding service experience led us to neuroscience methods such as NIRS; addressing sustainability challenges required integrating circular economy and service design; and managing these transformations naturally connects to technology and innovation management.”

Additionally, there is the freedom to take intellectual risks necessary for truly transformative work. “What I deeply appreciate about JAIST is that, despite the pressures of academia, the university genuinely respects the autonomy of individual researchers," he says. "There is a strong culture of trust. No one questions why you are trying something new; rather, there is quiet support for pursuing original ideas.”

From growth to wellbeing: The road ahead
Looking ahead, Prof. Shirahada envisions a future where service systems are designed not just for efficiency, but for meaning, resilience, and long-term impact. “From a post-growth perspective, the key question becomes not ‘how much we grow’ but ‘how well we live,’” he remarks.

He believes we are already seeing early signs of this transition with Industry 5.0, which moves beyond Industry 4.0's focus on efficiency and automation to emphasize human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. Ultimately, this approach encourages a broader shift, moving from simply delivering products or services to co-creating long-term value across society, economy, and the natural environment.

About Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Founded in 1990 in Ishikawa prefecture, the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) was the first independent national graduate university in Japan that has its own campus to carry out research-based graduate education in advanced science and technology. The term “Advanced” in JAIST’s name reflects the Japanese term “Sen Tan,” meaning “cutting-edge,” representing the university’s focus on being at the forefront of innovative research and education. Now, after 30 years of steady progress, JAIST has become one of Japan’s top-ranking universities. JAIST aims to foster capable leaders through its advanced education and research curricula. About 40% of JAIST’s alumni are international students. The university has a unique style of graduate education to ensure that students have a thorough foundation to build cutting-edge research and technology in the future. JAIST also works closely with both local and overseas academic and industrial communities, promoting industry–academia collaborative research.

Website: https://www.jaist.ac.jp/english/