Service Patterns: Good in theory, Hard in practice.

As a Service Designer, user research is core to our practice and time and time again I find myself wondering how to create an insight repo in order to share valuable pieces of information on common behaviours and motivations learned across multiple services so that they can then be shared across industries, domains and other sectors. We often look for analogous examples and metaphors to prompt inspiration and ideation, but at what point can it become more than just inspiration?