"Services science applies insights from scientific, management, and engineering perspectives to analyze how to align people and technology effectively to generate value for both services providers and clients."

A new field called Services Science is beginning to emerge in academia. Services dominate our economy (three-fourths of all jobs), and a rising share of service jobs are highly skilled and technology-intensive, including such activities such as outsourcing, consulting, and process re-engineering. The purpose of the new discipline is to bring analytical rigor to key issues such as services efficiency and services innovation. As a new academic discipline, services science will simultaneously create new knowledge as well as train the first cohorts of services experts with a strong understanding of both business and technology. Ideally they would have the technical expertise of a computer science or engineering major and the business savvy of an MBA. Recent articles in Business Week, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Technology Review, and The Wall Street Journal have highlighted this new discipline.

Why a new discipline is needed:

1. Although services dominate the world economy, academic programs and research activity in engineering and business schools do not meet the needs of this sector.
2. Services pose unique business and technical challenges. Services are co-produced by the customer and the provider on a customized basis. The provider must understand the customer's business and the customer must understand the provider's capabilities for the exchange to be successful. New tools need to be developed to measure and model efficiency and innovation in this unique context.
3. The marketplace is changing. Businesses need to be "open" - able to interact with other businesses, to be adaptive - to respond to market pressures, and to be reconfigurable - to accommodate geopolitical changes and strategic realignments. Even manufacturing and IT companies are moving towards providing services of immediate and explicit value to their customers, and away from selling components that would likely be commoditized . Services experts with a blend of managerial and technical skills are needed to meet these challenges.