"Suggest further focus on Digitally Connected Service. Digital connection is key to improving scaling of service and service productivity and quality, transparency and regulatory compliance, and sustainable innovation. Cyber-Enabled Design of service on a Cyber-Infrastructure is critical to scaling as well."
- Cheng Hsu, Rensselare Polytechnic Institute, USA

"Generally, the paper gives a good motivation why service science is an important research discipline. In this context, the paper does a good job in arguing why service science becomes particularly relevant nowadays. We think this is quite important since services are of course not a new concept and have been a key business activity for centuries. In order to improve the readability of the paper for an audience that is not familiar with the topic, we think it is indispensable to make statements clearer using more concrete definitions of terms and some examples. Currently the paper is written on a very abstract level and many statements are rather hard to grasp. It should become clear for the readers that they are already part of many service systems. In addition, we think the audience would appreciate more discussion about how a service-led economy may look like in future. One example could be a discussion about how services may change the way companies work.

The paper does a really good job in motivating why we need to increase investment in the service science field. It gives clear recommendations what companies, universities and public bodies should do to face the future challenges. Perhaps the point would be even clearer if consequences of not addressing the issue were discussed in more detail.

1) Markets and particularly financial exchanges are good examples for service systems and show how different kinds of services can be composed to provide complex services. In this context, engineering each individual service requires knowledge about several different disciplines. For example, when designing allocation services for an exchange - for trading floors as well as for electronic platforms - one has to consider economic properties such as incentive compatibility, technical aspects such as computational tractability, legal regulations, social as well as psychological factors, etc.

2) More and more complex software systems are built using service-oriented architectures. To develop middleware services for such architectures an interdisciplinary mindset is required. While the software developer of course requires appropriate software engineering skills, she/he also requires in depth knowledge about the legal requirements underlying the contracting of services, about the economic properties of service sourcing mechanisms, etc.

Examples of interdisciplinary research: The Thesus project (http://theseus-programm.de/about-theseus) is a research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology, with the goal of developing a new Internet-based service in order to better use and utilize the knowledge available on the Internet. The courses on 'Industrial Engineering and Management' and 'Computer Science' integrate traditional engineering methodologies with economics, management and informatics in order to realize the idea of T-shaped skills. Complementary to this, the 'Information Engineering and Management' program focuses on an interdisciplinary view on computer science, economics, strategic and operational management, and law. The goal of this program is to organize the usage of information as an economic good and competition success factor.

To expand the existing programs towards a more holistic view on eOrganisation and service engineering, there will be two new industry sponsored professorships "Service Innovation & Management" and "Economics and Technology of eOrganisation". We plan to use the document as a basic reading in courses such as service innovation and management. One of the fundamental questions that we think is not perfectly answered by the document: Is there really a need for an integrated theory? Why is it not sufficient to have several (not necessarily coherent) theories available that give answer to concrete problems? It would be nice to mention problems that cannot be solved without a single integrated service science theory."
- Rudi Studer, Christof Weinhardt , Steffen Lamparter, Benjamin Blau, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany