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Introduction to Special Issue: QUIS 11 Robert C. Ford and John H. Humphreys, Co-Editors

2010; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2326-3709

Robert C. Ford, John H. Humphreys,

Service and Product Innovation

It is our pleasure to again present some of the best papers from a Quality in Services (QUIS) Conference. At the QUIS 1 1 conference in Germany in June, 2009 there were 234 registered academics and practitioners from 27 countries presenting papers and discussing services management, marketing and the emerging discipline of service science. Of the 138 papers presented, we are pleased to share six of the best with you in this special issue. In addition, we offer an executive interview with Jim Spohrer, the IBM executive who is one of the co-founders and driving forces behind the emerging academic field of service science (Chesbrough & Spohrer, 2006). In putting this special issue together we wanted to give our readers the opportunity to learn more about this new discipline and the man who has energized its development.In addition to this interview, we have selected papers that allow some understanding of the scope of services and the different research opportunities it offers scholars. Much of this work is anchored to a Vargo and Lusch (2004) article that is quite familiar to those in marketing but still relatively unknown to our management colleagues. In their work they talked about the transition from what they termed a goods dominant logic to a service dominant logic. They offered key premises for their argument and several of the authors in this special issue used one or more of these to buttress their papers. Some readers may recall a paper by Bob Ford with Dave Bowen (Ford & Bowen, 2008) that tried to capture the attention of management scholars and teachers for a service dominant logic for management. Their point was that writers m marketing are heavily involved in services and the new service science and management scholars and teachers who wish to stay relevant in a service economy need to become familiar with this literature. One of our goals was to expose the readers of this journal to some of the exciting developments taking place in services research in the hope of spurring further investigation into how teaching and researching services can be a productive and interesting part of their academic work.This leads us to introduce the papers in this special issue. First is a paper, Applying Service Logic and Theory to Entrepreneurship, by Scott E. Sampson and Larry J. Menor, that gives an excellent overview of the Vargo and Lusch (2004) argument for a Service Dominant Logic and then offers some perspectives on how that logic fits into management theory. This paper is followed by Service Business in Manufacturing Companies: Identifying Misconceptions and Directing Further Research, by Heiko Gebauer, that offers an interesting discussion of how service adds value to the manufactured product. The next paper is Design for Product-Service Systems - A Literature Review, by Marion A. Weissenberger-Eibl and Sabine Biege, that expands this issue of service as part of a manufactured product by surveying the literature that discusses the design implications of this integration of service with product. …