"This is an excellent document and I commend all associated with this path breaking work. Please emphasize service business models and service value chains more in future work to improve relevance to business managers."
- Nirmal Pal, formerly at Pennsylvania State University, USA

"The document aims to provide a broad overview of SSME. The aims are clear and consistent throughout. There is a need for more material on service design, especially case studies as a key focus for practice and theory. Much SSME content is already included in industrial engineering tools and techniques (simulation, project management, data collection methods, demand forecasting, decision analysis, large scale system design, knowledge management, new service design, etc.)."
- Tan Kay Chuan, National University of Singapore

"I am not an expert at service science… This represents the best overview/introduction I have read. …Let's get to work designing the next innovative service experience!"
- Keith Instone, IBM, ibm.com user experience design

"Excellent start, but execution needs more pragmatism. Let's keep it simple - SOA is a good starting point… Again let's not get lost in the science."
- Freddie Moran, IBM UK

"Need 'adaptive and proactive innovators.' Seems to be the intersection of project management, complexity theory, and open innovation. Project management website (http://www.pmi.org) has information about a shared body of knowledge. Reading the document, a sentence came up to my mind: 'Service innovation: where science meets art!?' This is because the creativity that is found mostly in art seems to be increasingly important to 'technological' services (i.e. services using some kind of technology, now mainly ICT technologies). My research is now about the transformation of the traditional telecommunications operators, with special focus on BT. And this transformation is fundamentally about service innovation: how to innovate faster in order to (co-)create better and cheaper (or more affordable) services? BT is now deploying its BT 21st Century Network, which is a platform that will allow BT to develop new services faster and more effectively, and co-create services with third parties (in a more systematic way). BT Operate and BT Design are the new divisions of BT focusing on service innovation. And other major telecommunications operators like Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and NTT are moving somehow to this concept of having an all-IP (Internet Protocol) network/infrastructure to foster service innovation."
- Carlos Sato, University of Sussex, UK

"T-shaped professionals need to be capable of creating strategic differentiation and operational excellence for their service employers. Strategic differentiation emphasizes the creation of novel service packages that lead to increased sales revenues. It involves strategy formulation, marketing, design, innovation and supply chains management. Operational excellence, on the other hand, focuses on achieving short-term improvements in processes that leads to lowered cost of services sold. It emphasizes productivity, measurements, quality, operations, human resource management, engineering and computing. T-shape professionals are thus required to become familiar with the principles and methodologies of visioning the future and leading cross-functional teams to bring about breakthrough innovations needed in the marketplace as well as of applying proven engineering technologies and other tools to achieve gains in productivity, efficiency, quality and cost."
- Carl Chang, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

"This is a fabulous beginning to standardizing the language and nomenclature of service. As a provider of software components, we always struggle with a common set of designations, labels, and identifiers when conversing and communicating with our customers who are also software developers. Because they are in specific applications and industry segments, they have their own way to describe like concepts. Establishing an agreement on the standard services language is highly important. In addition to our commercial business, we are also growing our own resources through relationships with Universities and hiring Interns/Coop students. This is one area in which I will experiment with developing adaptive innovations for the rest of our corporation. Students of today are savvier when it comes to service systems than I was in the 1980's. Also, to communicate the "services innovation" message, we will need more facts and stories. Graphs with data help tremendously - quick summary bullets help fast paced business professionals to get the point critical in this quest."
- Marshall Lee, Spatial Corporation, USA

"The aim of the paper can be made clearer by giving more information about the role of service innovation in organisations."
- Lorna Uden, Staffordshire University, UK

"I have been doing a lot of thinking and study about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 - and aside from the technology - what I walk away thinking is that we have not made people part of the equation. Enterprise 1.0 automated transactions, took people out of the cycle (automated teller machines). But what you're talking about - these service systems/networks - really are about information and people being equal. Flickr is a great example - people and information are both important. Flickr with no photos is just a random chat room; Flickr with no people is just a photo repository - but the two together and you have value co-creation (trying to borrow your words). Your recommmendatioms to business beg for this type of "Flcikr system" to exist.

I think most people in the enterprise/business world have not grasped this idea and it sits at the core of innovation in sales, service, R&D. This brings me to my only other big point. While using service science is good -- you need to make sure people understand that sales is service, service is service and R&D is service - to often this term leads people to think about call centers rather than what you're trying to get across. I'm not trying to get you to rename anything - just to more overtly remind people that Citibank (everyone that works there) - is in the service business; not just the guys at the call center."
- Timothy Chou, Entrepreneur and author of 'End of Software', US

"What is so painfully missing in today's large services business is the inclusion of the human factor. Because human behaviour is messy, no one wants to tackle it. I would maintain that service professionals require significant doses of practical lessons on human behaviour and development.

For example,

• body language
• micro-body language
• organizational theory and behaviour
• understanding morale with and without surveys
• understanding human response to change
• understanding human behaviour in co-creation environments where game theory becomes important to understand operational behavior

This is all leading to an answer to the fundamental questions about service

• how do you know when you're successful?
• how do you know when you are as successful as you can be?
• how do you make better economic judgments on service content and quality based on satisfaction?
• how do you know what to correct before the client stops buying the service
• what are the satisfaction curves for service offerings? (more step function than smooth)
• how do you know when you're on the edge?"

- Craig Nygard, IBM US