By Jim Spohrer, Director Global University Programs, IBM, ISSIP Founding Member  –  “The ISSIP SIG Education & Research invites new members!  If you have an interest in service science and innovation, please contact us!  Currently, we have about 30 members, and plan to grow to 100 members by the end of the year.

Our SIG aims to increase the quantity of service science related courses and degree programs, and open data sets for service research.

We invite new members to provide a 15 minute presentation to the rest of the SIG members during our bi-weekly 30 minutes calls.  For example, Prof. Louis Freund of San Jose State University presented about his Service System Engineering course.   These presentations become a resource for new members to see service science related courses from engineering, business, operations research, and other disciplinary perspectives, to learn form each other and collaborate.

We have also had intro presentations from industry (e.g., “the kind of service science graduates we would like to hire are…”) and students (e.g., “what I learned in the course I took inspired me to go on an seek a PhD in service science…”).   We would like to have an intro presentation from a government policymaker interested in promoting service innovation policy, or an economist thinking about new measures of productivity.

Our SIG members are working ways to help service innovation professionals evaluate how T-shaped they are – where are their areas of depth, and how they develop their breadth.

We are planning conference special sessions, as well as whitepapers and other publications.  These should help us grow membership as well as useful content on the website.

Our SIG is also conducting a survey on service education, Ralph Badinelli is the contact.”

To join send a note to chair-ersig@issip.org.