"I wholeheartedly support this work and look forward to future interactions with this community. …it is contained within a larger and even more critical domain – the science of viable enterprise systems. Net value production in an enterprise derives from complex interaction among service and non-service oriented processes. The enterprise provides the platform for running the value creating applications. Service science is a key part of enterprise science (theory, architecture, infrastructure, applications, etc.) supporting the production of all goods and services."
- Jay Bayne, Milwaukee Institute, USA

"A most useful report – thank you! Also, this work is highly related to the social studies of science, and in particular the notion of trading zone and interactional expertise (see Collins, H., Evans, R., and Gorman, M., 2007)"
- Michael Gorman, University of Virginia, USA

"You omit mathematicians, logician, and semanticians – all of whom will be needed to formalize the integration of these many knowledge domains. Need to address service systems in which the customer is not the payee, but the commissioner – indirect service systems are complex and common. Is service system just a re-labeling of the complexity of the human element? Finally, there is perhaps great need, but little or no demand for polymaths (sadly)."
- Richard Taylor and Chris Tofts, HP UK

"This is a great first step in trying to move the academic environment in the direction of service science and being relevant in the 21st century. It has already stimulated much discussion on campuses worldwide, and has provided direction for implementation of new programs. However, I am concerned that this document has a heavy engineering slant to it. It seems to come from a supply viewpoint, and tends to leave out a focus on the customer. It is the customer that should be the driving force behind all of this."
- Dwayne Gremler, Bowling Green State University, USA

"Comment 1: There exists already quite a lively debate on bringing together research on product and service innovation (see Gallouj and Weinstein, 1997; DeVries, 2006; Drejer, 2004; Howells and Tether, 2006). Especially some effort has been placed already to develop concepts for studying innovation within a unifying framework rather than applying service or product specific models. A short acknowledgement of these efforts would help recognizing this emerging stream of literature which takes place for instance in journals such as Research Policy.

Comment 2: Concerning the need for interdisciplinary research: during the second annual Product and Service Innovation Conference in Park City, Utah, in February 2005, scholars argued that an urgent need for future research in innovation studies would be to close the gap between the, up to now still separate, research streams within the disciplines of marketing and operations management (cf. Karniouchina et al., 2006)."
- Henning Droege, ESADE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

"One of the disciplines missing from the text is project management. There seems to be a mindset that a service is delivered by a single person. However in many industries, the service offering delivered may take many people, working for many months to define, develop and deliver. As such these service offerings are managed as projects. "
- Paul Ferguson, IBM Global Business Services, Australia

"The document presents the introduction of SSME as it was a completely new development on the service field. Although previous efforts made by service academics and researchers are mentioned, the document requires more clarity and emphasis on the foundations of services management. A full section or chapter to give credit to pioneer efforts and contributions in different parts of the world is strongly suggested. Overall, this part of the document is rather short and shallow, and again, it has a particular focus on service innovation. When developing countries are mentioned, it only refers to China and India. However, I strongly suggest to include Latin America as a different region. This is a different region which presents already a higher percentage of service sector contribution to GDP. Privatization, FDI and other factors illustrate the strategic importance of services in this region. Countries like Mexico, Brazil, Panamá, Costa Rica, for instance, deserve special attention."
- Javier Reynoso, ITESM, Mexico

"I do believe that many important business problems can be solved through an integrated cross disciplinary view of service systems. One example which comes to mind is healthcare claims adjudication. Manual healthcare claims adjudication has been an issue for many years. Contracts, which specify the entitlements of members of a health plan, have become significantly more complex since the introduction of managed care. Healthcare computer applications have difficulty adjusting to changing contract structures. So claims which the applications cannot support are handled manually resulting in accuracy issues and adding cost to the healthcare system. In the United States alone, hundreds of millions of healthcare claims are processed annually. Computer applications can be developed which automatically adjudicate most healthcare claims and respond to changing requirements.

In order to do this, the contracts would have to be represented in an extensible language which can be interpreted by the applications. Computer Science practitioners have been trained to build computer programs which are driven by structures specified in recursively defined extensible languages. But these practitioners are not normally trained in the analysis of business requirements. Information Systems practitioners have been trained in analysis methodologies, but are not normally trained in the required linguistic structures. Expertise from both of these disciplines is needed to solve the problem. It is not hard to think of other examples where the implementation of the ideas in the discussion paper, in particular crossing traditional silos, would make substantial improvements in the delivery of services."
- Paul Weinberg, Temple University, USA

"The major points in the body of the document as well as the recommendations match well those coming from other similar meetings. There were two NSF symposia past summer - one in Portland and the other at Penn State. The report seems to match the major recommendations in terms of the requirement of 'T-shaped professional', new education programs and funding opportunities.

I think a major component that is missing in this document which is the management of technology. One of the meetings in Portland was focused on this topic as technologies start merging. Management of technological innovation has been very critical in the manufacturing industry. The experts agree that it is even more important in the service sector due to the increased human interaction.

For example, my personal interest is the health care service organizations. If one looks at this industry closely, it is seen that the innovation diffusion coefficient has been really low. The complexity of the system is one of the factors that influence this. Another factor or factors are the doctors themselves. The complexity and the risk of their job prevents them from adopting technologies faster. It is an area that needs a lot of attention so that we can solve the mysteries of those factors hindering innovation in this complex service system. It is getting even more complex as technologies such as nano, bio and information are converging towards smart drugs, or remote diagnosis."
- Tugrul U Daim, Portland State University, USA

"The main missing idea here is that you neglected the Media industry with its all new coming innovative services, such as 'Convergence between ICMT and Media'. All my recommendation will concentrate on that vision plus other issues related to service life cycle (requirements engineering). This paper could include Media whenever ICT is mentioned as audiovisual content for broadcasters, filmed entertainment, interactive entertainment and music should consolidate with ICT (especially, IPTV, iTV, mobile phone, PMPs, VOD and Webcasting). For example, the phrase 'provider-customer' everywhere in the document could just as well read 'provider-customer/consumer'. The word customer all over the paper may be replaced by customer/consumer. How do customer/consumers access service in an easy and friendly manner? Reachability is an important characteristic of service system design. If you cannot reach or access the service system, it cannot benefit you when you need it. The discipline of Requirement Engineering (RE) is not listed."
- Abdelrahman Saad, Egypt-Mediasoft, Egypt

"Very good initiative aimed at better and far more comprehensive understanding of service systems and in particular service innovation. Main observations: I believe that even more radical focus should be given to developing human resources with knowledge and skills that would enable them to understand better service systems and assume service mindset. As clearly pointed out in the document the stakeholders in service science have problems in understanding each other and I believe that some of the opinions/comments on the document will fully reflect this dichotomy. My comments are no exception to that, still I hope they can contribute to improving the document.

The most general comment I can make concerns inclusiveness of the service science concept that is put forward time and again in the document. However, reading the whole document does not give me confidence that this is the case as there is a focus on marketing & management (MM) issues. Other disciplines such as economics are mentioned several times, but do not seem to be on equal footing with MM. I guess that this reflects to a certain extent the structure of symposium attendees and other specialists involved so far by discipline and by country of origin (UK, USA, Canada, with the exception of German participant). Since the document invites 'an inclusive global discussion' this could be achieved in the future by attracting participants from different disciplinary and geographical constituencies.

There is also a need to balance the role of different stakeholders as the document focuses on business stakeholders, while public sector organisations are put aside, except for universities and research institutions. Even the business stakeholders are mostly associated with big, complex service systems. What about SMEs that dominate the company landscape? In order to contribute to understanding of service system a box could be added in the document exemplifying a case of a simplified service system that includes different stakeholders participation in efficient functioning of the system. On the other hand the involvement of people with different discipline and skills could also be added to the case. Besides national funding institutions for research also international funding institutions, such as for example EC; OECD; ECB; WB, EBRD could be added as potential stakeholders in supporting interdisciplinary research of service systems. On the EU wide level there exist a set of documents, programmes and projects concerning service innovation, which also include methodological and measurement issues (http://www.proinno-europe.eu). There is a need to explore how Community Innovation Surveys could be complemented with SSME concepts. Appendix I needs some refining and supplementation. Basically, history and future of service research are biased in favour of marketing, organisation."
- Metka Stare, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

"Your definition of service management in the Glossary of the Cambridge paper begins to capture the interdisciplinary essence of service management. I attempted to illustrate this joint view in my Figure 2.8 Open-Systems View of Service Operations. I rather liked your Figure 2 better because it included in addition HR and IT, functions that must also be managed. I liked your focus on service innovation and need for interdisciplinary research."
- James Fitzsimmons, University of Texas at Austin, USA