The “Go-To Place” for Service Research & Innovation
The Service Research and Innovation Community (SRIC) is the focal point of the SRII initiative. It's the place where a community of service-based “seekers” and “solvers” come together to collaborate with the common goal of driving increased levels of innovation into a growing globally dominated services economy. SRIC is an online community that will enable Industry, Government and Academia to share information, connect with peers and collaborate around service research and innovation ideas and best practices.
Community Involvement
SRII has the support of an impressive list of companies / organizations / universities and individuals that are highly involved in the areas of service research and innovation, all of whom have committed their time, expertise and experience to be actively involved in supporting this online community (SRIC). We thought you might like to hear first hand why they are involved and what they believe needs to be done to make this community a viable resource for all of those that are involved. We have asked Jim Spohrer, Ph. D., Director, Alamden Services Research, IBM to be the first to provide us with his feedback. We hope that these comments prove useful to you and help you better understand the value and importance of engaging in a meaningful way.
Why is it important to have a virtual service research and innovation community?
“No one of us is as smart as all of us" -- the need for service innovation will only be increasing in the coming decades, as global service delivery, self service, software as a service, and more market attention shifts to issues of service quality, productivity, regulatory compliance, and sustainability. As with other waves of innovation in the last century, a strong R&D community that brings together industry, academics, government, and the non-profit sector can accelerate progress and sharing of information that leads to breakthroughs.Why does IBM think it is important to be a part of that community?
IBM Global Services is an innovation amplifier that has scaled out many technology waves across multiple industries, most recently the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) to support GIE (Globally Integrated Enterprises). IBM is proud to be a founding member, and hopes to stimulate service innovation progress and breakthroughs that can be scaled up and out to benefit business and society. Service Research is the newest area in IBM Research, and complements a tradition of innovation in existing Technology, Software, and Systems areas.What does Jim Spohrer hope to achieve from his involvement in the community
What do you expect/want from other community members?
Many of our projects and initiatives around Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME, an emerging academic discipline) can only succeed if academic-industry-government collaborations with a focus on service innovation can take root in hundreds and eventually thousands of universities around the world. I hope to reach out to members of the growing SRIC who are interested in collaborating and helping with this initiative and related projects.
Spread the word. Get others to sign up and contribute either a short description of an area of expertise ("solvers") or a problem of interest ("seekers"). Even a sentence or two from hundreds or thousands of people would provide a nice initial map for the community. For example, my team in Almaden Research has expertise in "solver: modeling business architectures, business insight analytics, process innovation, performance dashboarding, and virtual world rehearsals of service interactions" and need for "seeker: theory of service systems, value propositions, governance mechanisms, and scaling service networks."
How would you define success and what can community members do to ensure success?Step 1: One thousand individual members, distributed globally from academic, industry, government and non-profit sector with short "solver and seeker" statements (see mine above).
Step 2: An active sharing of interesting practical advances and topics of interest - the beginning of the practice side of the community.
Step 3: A glossary of key terms and definitions for the emerging areas to help newcomers to the area understand the discussions - the beginning of the research side of the community.
Step 4: A consensus set of documents and research priorities
Step 5: "We are all in service." More organizations with service innovation roadmaps and investment strategies to achieve improvements in service quality, productivity, regulatory compliance, and sustainable innovation. This should benefit industry and society.
If you have questions, or would like to be more involved with the SRII / SRIC please feel free to contact us.
