Article Preview
TopIntroduction
We interact daily with complex service systems for a plethora of reasons (e.g., transportation to reach our office, energy, telecommunications, etc.). The importance of the service economy has risen dramatically during the last 20-30 years, although only in the last decade has the scientific community, with the conceptualization of Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) and Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME, Service Science in short), put a strong multidisciplinary emphasis on the general understanding and improvement of service systems2 (Giuiusa, Spohrer, & Modi, 2012).
According to the research stream of Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Vargo et al., 2006; Vargo, 2011; Lush & Vargo, 2011), service is the fundamental basis of exchange (Vargo & Lush, 2008). In fact, one of the fundamental premises of SDL is that all economies are service economies. Hence, what has changed today’s perception of service is not that “services are overtaking goods in economic activity, but rather that the relative inadequacy of the goods-based classification system of businesses for capturing and informing changes in economic activity is becoming increasingly apparent” (Vargo & Lush, 2008).
SDL defines service as the process of using one’s resources (skills and knowledge) for the benefit of another entity (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Vargo & Lusch, 2006). Consequently the concept of “two entities, one creating value (producer) and another destroying value (consumer), typical of Good-dominant logic, in a service context make no-sense” (Maglio et al., 2009). So, value can only be cocreated3 (Vargo & Lusch, 2006) and it is implicit in the interactional nature of service (Vargo & Lusch, 2008).
Service science is an emerging transdiscipline integrating insights from existing disciplines (e.g., service marketing, service operations, service computing, service design, service economics, service engineering, etc.) into a new whole without replacing any of the parts. Each disciplinary part contributes to the evolution of value-cocreation interactions between complex service systems, with universities from around the world directly involved in generating new knowledge, the benefits of which are leading to global transformation and societal progress (Lella, et al., 2012; Spohrer & Giuiusa, 2012; Spohrer et al., 2013). Service Science (Maglio et al., 2010) has adopted value-cocreation as one of the defining characteristics of service systems (Yang et al., 2013), which is part of the Service System Worldview based on Service-Dominant Logic (Maglio et al., 2009).