"If education and business wish to encourage students to study SSME, they will need to define and communicate typical post-graduation SSME job roles, responsibilities, and salaries. Otherwise students will not have the practical information they need to confidently select this discipline as a course of study over other traditional disciplines with known career paths."
- Kelly Lyman, IBM Research, USA

"The rate of breakthrough, university-spearheaded innovation in services management and marketing has been slowing. Universities in general, and business school in particular, have become too entrenched in their disciplines with an increasingly narrow focus, often on niche research topics, to drive true innovation in management thinking. The rapid advance of the service economy with increasingly complex systems might just offer this opportunity to define new frameworks, thinking and even new vocabulary, and break free from the departmental and faculty-centric thinking in our universities. Perhaps, SSME can become a catalyst for a paradigm shift in service research, education and management."
- Jochen Wirtz, National University of Singapore

"Overall, the paper is a highly pertinent and progressive. I agree with the need for service science as an interdisciplinary approach that leverages collaboration across stakeholders. Service science is evolving from a business and societal need for understanding and solving increasingly complex problems. The problems are not being solved in the most effective manner as the talent is not equipped with the right set of competencies to address new challenges. Higher education systems, as the producers of talent, need to wake up to this call and work collaboratively with industry and policy makers to develop 'adaptive innovators'."
- Rahul Choudaha, University of Denver, USA

"This paper quickly and cogently describes the need for and lays some of the foundation for a new field aimed at the study and improvement of service called service science. I expect it will wind up being an important and influential paper. The target audience includes educators, business-people, and policy-makers - and it has something for each of them. For education, it describes the need to create a new kind of cross-disciplinary education aimed students who will work in service jobs and who will be particularly adapted to innovate in service. For business, it describes the clear and present need focus on service innovation in terms of R&D and workforce. For policy, it describes how governments must take notice of the need to cultivate service innovation or risk irrelevance. For all, it contains concrete advice for how to succeed by creating a culture that values service innovation.

It is a great paper. My detailed comments follow in the sections below. Mainly I quibble with some terminology, suggest that real citations or references are needed throughout (somehow), and discuss how service science is like a perspective that has us consider the world in terms of service systems but that there is little necessity to the commitments we're making here -- these are empirical questions that the paper sometimes takes as fact. The long list of service disciplines may also be confusing and annoying to some."
- Paul Maglio, IBM Research

"The Service Science Laboratory should be an integral part of a SSME academic program. I see it as the bridge between the students' academic learning and the invaluable experience they can gain from working collaboratively with a multi-disciplinary team engaged in problem-based learning. The Laboratory is the platform to provide support to the students to experiment with and evaluate realistic service system scenarios within the extent of physical (or real), virtual and simulated worlds. Seeking sponsors of these projects is great way to establish and enhance partnerships with stake-holders in the business community."
- Stephen K. Kwan, San José State University, USA

"A key thrust of service science is to raise awareness for research and development collaboration for services, in particular between service businesses and academic institution. This collaboration, however, faces specific challenges that are currently not addressed in the paper. Research and development on services that are co-produced with customers is difficult to conduct separated from the field or customer using the service. Research activities may thus need to become embedded into the delivery of services to customer. Such a deep integration is likely to require social capital between an academic institution and the service firm. Given the short history of service research, these strong links may not yet exist.

Simultaneously, the integration of research into service delivery may require greater flexibility on the part of the participating researchers. Ideally, researcher can be seconded to service projects in order to facilitate the transfer of knowledge between service professionals and researchers. This underscores the need to develop innovative forms of research collaboration for service research that seek to maintain long-term relationships and provide greater flexibility in terms of job assignments.

I agree the drive towards an integrative qualification though I doubt that this can be achieved without prior integrative research that identifies the relevant intersection of concepts from related-disciplines or that can even build on true interdisciplinary research results on a theory of service systems. Just connecting teaching from relevant disciplines is certainly insufficient as the integration then is left to the individual student.

I would like to see a Master of Service Engineering and Management that is as well-respected as today MBA programmes are as a professional qualification for leadership roles in organizations. Moreover, many service organizations in traditional industries still lack the acceptance of academic qualifications. More advocacy for academic SSME qualifications is thus necessary outside knowledge-intensive service businesses such as ICT, financial services, and consulting. Service research and innovation may need new forms of collaboration between business and research to ensure mutual transfer of knowledge and dissemination. In particular, secondments from business into service research projects and from service science researchers into business projects needs to be facilitated (cf. Böhmann, T., Jahner, S., Krcmar, H. (2008): The perspective of informatics. In: Stauss, B. et al.: Service Science: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Future Developments. Springer: Heidelberg, New York, pp. 149-154)."
- Tilo Böhmann, ISS International Business School of Service Management, Germany