Contact Details

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Position

Doctoral Alumnus

Affiliation

Dr Guangjie Ren

Research Interests

• Service business development in manufacturing companies
• New service development in capital goods industries

Biography

Guang-Jie Ren has recently joined the Services Model team at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California. In the past few years, the Services Model team has established itself as a driving force behind Component Business Modeling methods and tools, which are widely used by IBM consultants in client engagement. Lately, the team’s research focus has been extended to Actionable Business Architecture, which intends to integrate strategy analysis with downstream activities such as Business Process Modeling and Service- Oriented Architecture. Since working in August 2009, Guang-Jie has not only contributed to the research agenda but also taken an active part in developing new directions for business modelling in IBM.

Guang-Jie was born in Shanghai and of the same age as China's reform, which has led to dramatic changes all over the nation. He was trained as an industrial engineer in operations management, and received his bachelor degree and master degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He then joined the Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, in 2004 as a visiting scholar and worked with Dr Yongjiang Shi on manufacturing location decision in emerging economies and operations strategies of multinational corporations in China. He took an active part in an overseas study tour and visited more than 20 companies in China’s major industrial areas.

In 2005, Guang-Jie started his PhD research under the guidance of Professor Mike Gregory, and with funding support from the prestigious Overseas Research Studentship and Raymond and Helen Kwok Scholarship. His research was focused on service business development in manufacturing industries (commonly known as the servicisation phenomenon). Through close collaboration with nine UK engineering firms, the study identified various types of service offerings and provided insights into their characteristics and implications. In July 2007, Guang-Jie’s co-authored paper on new technology adoption won the Best Student Paper Award at the POMS Service Operations Conference. Later in that year, he received the ASU Center for Services Leadership/Liam Glynn Research Award at the Frontiers in Service Conference in recognition of his research potential. In February 2010, his PhD dissertation won the Highly Commended Award in the Operations and Production Management category of the 2009 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award.

In parallel with his research, Guang-Jie was instrumental in organising the Cambridge Service Science, Management and Engineering Symposium in July 2007. The event was joined by leading academics and senior industrialists and it produced a definitive white paper on the emerging field of Service Science. His unique contribution earned him the prestigious IBM PhD Fellowship in 2008. In the same year, he became an AIM scholar, working on the High Value Manufacturing project at the UK Advanced Institute of Management Research. Outside of research, Guang-Jie was also a Teaching Assistant for Cambridge Manufacturing Engineering Tripos during 2007-8.

Last updated on March 26, 2010

Publications and presentations

• Guangjie Ren and Mike Gregory, 'Growing services in manufacturing: Lessons from leading industrial companies', Invited talk, Cranfield School of Management, 17 June 2009. [Download PDF slides 2Mb]
• Guangjie Ren and Mike Gregory, 'Implementing service strategy in manufacturing companies: The case for a 'whole business' approach', 16th International Annual EurOMA Conference, Goteborg, Sweden, June 14-17, 2009. [Download PDF slides 644k]
• Guangjie Ren and Mike Gregory, ‘Service Business Development: Context, Content and Process’, Frontiers in Service Conference, Washington DC, USA, 2–5 October 2008.
  http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/frontiers2008/pdfs_docs/Ren.pdf
• Co-author, IfM and IBM, ‘Succeeding through Service Innovation: A Service Perspective for Education, Research, Business and Government’, University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing, April 2008.
• Co-author, ‘High Value Manufacturing: Delivering on the Promise’, Advanced Institute of Management Research, London, UK, 2008.
  http://www.aimresearch.org/uploads/File/pdf/Executive Briefing/AIM HVM Final.pdf
• Guangjie Ren and Mike Gregory, ‘Servitization in Manufacturing Companies: Literature Review and Research Progress’, Invited talk at Cranfield Product Service Systems Seminar, Cranfield University, 7 November 2007.
  Download PDF file [404k]
• Guangjie Ren and Mike Gregory, ‘Servitization in Manufacturing Companies: A Conceptualization, Critical Review, and Research Agenda’, Frontiers in Service Conference, San Francisco, California, USA, 4–7 October 2007.
  https://ssme.rhsmith.umd.edu/ces/frontiers/presentations2007/Ren.pdf
• Aiesha Maxwell and Guangjie Ren, ‘New Technology Adoption in Field Service Operations’, POMS Service College Conference, London, UK, 12–13 July 2007.
  Download PDF file [204k]
• Co-author, ‘Overseas Research Report: China - A Tiger in the Supply Chain’, Institute for Manufacturing, 2005.
  http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/met/tour05/
• Guangjie Ren, Dacheng Liu, Li Zheng, Study on TOC-based OEE method, Manufacturing Engineering & Machine Tool (Chinese), No. 4, pp. 20-23, 2004.
• Guangjie Ren, Dacheng Liu, Li Zheng, Modification of Overall Equipment Effectiveness, International Conference on Electronic Commerce Engineering, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, P. R. China, Oct 24-27, 2003.
• Guangjie Ren, Dacheng Liu, Li Zheng, A Low-cost and Quick-effect Workshop-level Productivity Improvement Program, International Conference of Industrial Engineering, Beijing, P. R. China, Sep 19-21, 2002.