The 2nd Annual Conference on the Art and Science of Services
Instituto de Empresa
Madrid, Spain
May 24 to 26, 2006
Service Science: Academics and Business Practitioners Come Together at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid to Create a New Research Agenda for Managing Services
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, services are faced with more challenges than ever before. These include ever higher customer expectations, increasing competition, and the need to address the different cultures of both customers and workers that exist in a global economy. Technology provides the connectivity among service organizations and between service organizations and their customers, who may all be located in different corners of the world. At the same time, technology is providing firms with continuously increasing amounts of information on all aspects of managing a business, including information about customers, suppliers, and internal measures of performance. This information intense, real time, highly competitive business environment suggests the need for a new approach for managing services that meets both the practitioner’s need for relevance and the academic’s need for rigor.
Reconciling these needs requires a transdisciplinary approach that includes not only the applied areas of operations management, marketing, human resources, information technology and engineering, but also the more qualitative and quantitative theoretical areas like organizational behavior and operations research. This multidimensional approach is increasingly being called service science.
The challenge, therefore, for both business practitioners and business school academics alike is to develop a research agenda for services that not only will identify the key issues facing services today, but also suggest robust solutions that can be applied to a wide variety of services. Thought leaders from the business and academic worlds came together at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Spain, from May 24 to 26 to begin making headway on these issues.
This two-day workshop addressed the complex issues of research in services. Academics with a demonstrated interest in services and transdisciplinary research worked with service industry practitioners to identify the key challenges that service managers are now facing with the goal of proposing new, innovative approaches for studying those problems and identifying managerially relevant solutions.
