eBRC Workshop Addresses Services Sector Innovation
eBRC Workshop Addresses Services Sector Innovation
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (June 23, 2005)—With the services sector continuing to expand as a major segment of the U.S. economy, the eBusiness Research Center at Penn State's Smeal College of Business recently hosted a workshop on service innovations and new service business models, which featured the insights of more than 70 experts from across academia, industry, and government.
Broadly defined, services are capabilities or competencies that one person, organization, or enterprise provides for another. This sector constitutes more than 70 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Information Services is a major constituent of this services sector for which examples include IT outsourcing, business process outsourcing, or knowledge process outsourcing. Companies such as Xerox, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard now provide these types of services.
"Service innovation is the key to survival in these fast changing times," writes eBRC Director Nirmal Pal in "Service Innovation: A Framework for Success," the white paper that served as the foundation for the June 21-22 workshop at University Park. "Customer expectations are rapidly evolving and service innovations are the last defense against commoditization and the key to survival for almost every industry today."
The two-day event opened with a joint keynote address from Jim Spohrer, director of Almaden Services Research at IBM, which has taken a leading role in improving services research in the U.S.; and Uday Karmarkar, director of the Center for Management in the Information Economy at UCLA and the author of the Harvard Business Review article "Will You Survive the Services Revolution?"
Other keynote addresses included Krishna Nathan of IBM and Roland Rust of the University of Maryland; Anatole Gershman of Accenture and Bob Bauer of Xerox; and James Thomas of Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology.
Panel discussions during the workshop addressed specific aspects of the service innovation framework including customer value creation, customer demand generation, business processes and technology, and the overall organizational issues of skill, culture and metrics.
A white paper representing the discussions and outcomes of the workshop is currently being developed.
REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Center for Digital Transformation, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
