Jim Spohrer

Steps toward a science of service systems

The service sector accounts for most of the worlds economic activity, but its the least-studied part of the economy. A service system comprises people and technologies that adaptively compute and adjust to a systems changing value of knowledge. A science of service systems could provide theory and practice around service innovation

A research manifesto for services science

The services sector has grown over the last 50 years to dominate economic activity in most advanced industrial economies, yet scientific understanding of modern services is rudimentary. Here, we argue for a services science discipline to integrate across academic silos and advance service innovation more rapidly.

The service system is the basic abstraction of service science

Abstraction is a powerful thing. During the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as mass, energy, work, and power. During the twentieth century, the information revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as binary digit or bit, binary coding, and algorithmic complexity. Here, we propose an abstraction for the twenty-first century, in which there is an emerging revolution in thinking about business and economics based on a service-dominant logic. The worldview of service-dominant logic stands in sharp contrast to the worldview of the goods-dominant logic of the past, as it holds service—the application of competences for benefit of others—rather than goods to be the fundamental basis of economic exchange. Within this new worldview, we suggest the basic abstraction is the service system, a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Many systems can be viewed as service systems, including families, cities, and companies, among many others. In this paper, we show how the service-system abstraction can be used to understand how value is co-created, in the process laying the foundation for an integrated science of service.

Service systems, service scientists, SSME, and innovation

Computer scientists work with formal models of algorithms and computation, and someday service scientists may work with formal models of service systems. The four examples here document some of the early efforts to establish a new academic discipline and new profession.

Handbook of Service Science

As the service sector expands into the global economy, a new science of service is emerging, one that is dedicated to encouraging service innovation by applying scientific understanding, engineering discipline, and management practice to designing, improving, and scaling service systems. Handbook of Service Science takes the first major steps to clarifying the definition, role, and future of this nascent field. Incorporating work by scholars from across the spectrum of service research, the volume presents multidisciplinary perspectives on the nature and theory of service, on current research and practice in design, operations, delivery, and innovation of service, and on future opportunities and potential of service research. Handbook of Service Science provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience and marketing, and service management and innovation.

The Service System Is the Basic Abstraction of Service Science

Abstraction is a powerful thing. During the 19th century, the industrial revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as mass, energy, work, and power. During the 20th century, the information revolution was built on many powerful abstractions, such as binary digit or bit, binary coding, and algorithmic complexity. Here, we propose an abstraction that will be important to the service revolution of the 21st century: the service system, which is a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Many systems can be viewed as service systems, including families, cities, and companies, among many others. In this paper, we show how the service-system abstraction can be used to understand how value is created, in the process unifying concepts from many disciplines and creating the foundation for an integrated science of service.

Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED): An Emerging Discipline - Outline & References

The growth of the global service economy has led to a dramatic increase in our daily interactions with highly specialized service systems. Service (or value-cocreation) interactions are both frequent and diverse, and may include retail, financial, healthcare, education, on-line, communications, technical support, entertainment, transportation, legal, professional, government, or many other types of specialized interactions. And yet surprisingly few students graduating from universities have studied anything about service or service systems. Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED), or service science for short, is an emerging discipline aimed at understanding service and innovating service systems. This article sketches an outline and provides an extensive, yet preliminary, set of references to provoke discussions about the interdisciplinary nature of SSMED. One difficult challenge remaining is to integrate multiple disciplines to create a new and unique service science.

Toward a Science of Service Systems

Economics has accumulated a great body of knowledge about value. Building on economics and other disciplines, service science is an emerging transdiscipline. It is the study of value-cocreation phenomena (Spohrer & Maglio , 2010). Value cocreation occurs in the real-world ecology of diverse types of service system entities (e.g., people, families, universities, businesses, and nations). These entities use symbols to reason about the value of knowledge. Like mathematics (quantity relationship proofs) and computer science (efficient representations and algorithms), service science must ultimately embody a set of proven techniques for processing symbols, allowing us to model the world better and to take better actions. In addition, the emergence of service science promises to accelerate the creation of T-shaped Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals who are highly adaptive innovators that combine deep problem solving skills in one area with broad communication skills across many areas. This paper casts service science as a transdiscipline based on symbolic processes that adaptively compute the value of interactions among systems.

Systems, networks, and ecosystems in service research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create awareness on the need for lifting up the level of analysis in service research by focusing on systems, networks, and ecosystems to contribute to the research expansion of the traditionally narrow view of service. Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper is built upon three blocks. First, the viable systems approach is revised to highlight the survival, viability, and complexity of service systems. Second, the dynamics of service networks is discussed using an ecological view of service with a nested, networked configuration. Third, these two previous perspectives are integrated using the fundamentals of ecosystems thinking. Findings – This paper outlines a novel, tri-level approach reorienting and reframing our thinking around systems, networks, and ecosystems. Some research challenges and directions that could expand the body of knowledge in service research are also discussed. Research limitations/implications – The tri-level approach proposed ...

The Science of Service Systems

The Science of Service Systems intends to stimulate discussion and understanding by presenting theory-based research with actionable results. Most of the articles focus on formalizing the theoretical foundations for a science of service systems, examining a wide range of substantive issues and implementations related to service science from various perspectives. From the formal (ontologies, representation specifications, decision-making and maturity models) to the informal (analysis frameworks, design heuristics, anecdotal observations), these contributions provide a snapshot in time of the gradually emerging scientific understanding of service systems. The Science of Service Systems, along with its companion text, Service Systems Implementation, is designed to present multidisciplinary and multisectoral perspectives on the nature of service systems, on research and practice in service, and on the future directions to advance service science. These two volumes compose a collection of articles from those involved in the emerging area known as service science.