A major challenge in service design is the ability to generate useful service concepts for development. New service concepts, however, are often difficult for customers to articulate. In this study we address the idea generation stage of the service development process and suggest the integration of customer scripts to facilitate service concept discovery. We examine the process using data from in-depth laddering interviews with lead users of mobile services across three geographically diverse markets. Results show that the new service concepts generated in this study are applicable in all three markets but usage motivations differ by market. This implies that new service design and developments methods should take account of this and thus we suggest that new method should be developed to meet the industry needs. Our paper proposes one such method.