A research manifesto for services science

Abstract

A service science discipline to integrate across academic silos and advance service innovation more rapidly is discussed. Today services means jobs and growth, but the companies who have been leading the charge lack a strong conceptual foundation for their work and are now reaching out to academics. There are elements common across many different types of services that might form a foundation for services, including close interaction of supplier and customer, nature of knowledge created and exchanged, simultaneity of production and consumption, and exploitation of ICT and transparency. Services exchange involves a negotiated exchange between a provider and an adopter for the provision of intangible assets. Services exchange today involves many complex combinations of both codified and tacit knowledge. A number of European countries have done a great deal of work to understand the growth investment in services sector and to try to increase government investment in services.