There is increasing evidence suggesting that design interventions can affect ongoing practices within an organization. Yet limited insights are available on what it actually takes to integrate service design as an organizational practice. The present research takes an early step in investigating two cases where one-off design projects were conducted with the aim to not only innovate new services but to embed service design as an ongoing practice. The findings reveal that external design professionals can raise awareness of the benefits of service design and impart designerly skills and methods. However, the actual transformation towards adopting service design requires firm-internal people who lead by example. Designers and other external stakeholders might not have the ability to change the existing institutional arrangements from the outside-in. Instead, changes from the inside-out are additionally required with focus on empowering employees, users, and other stakeholders to engage in design