Welcome to the International Smart Service Conference Page!

We are excited to announce that the conference will take place on February 15th – 16th, 2018 in Paderborn, GER (participation by invitation only). The conference brings together Information Systems (IS) researchers and Service Marketing and Management (SMM) researchers from across Europe.

The International Smart Service Conference features emerging research in the rapidly growing area of smart service. The conference will bring together cutting edge researchers in the Service Science field, all of whom research service phenomena at the intersection of information systems and business research.

Recent advances in digitization increasingly transform our daily lives as consumers, employees, or employers. From an academic standpoint, digitization and other mega trends have transformed the scientific inquiry into ‘service’ as a research phenomenon, and have led to the emergence of Service Science as a distinctive and multi-disciplinary research field. Smart service, the focus of the conference, refers to service systems, in which the co-creation of value between service consumers and service providers relies on utilizing smart products (i.e., physical goods that are digitally networked with information systems and other goods) as boundary objects. Smart products mediate the interactions between both stakeholders and enable them to integrate their resources for mutual benefit. Smart service systems transform our understanding of long taken-for-granted service concepts, and need to be investigated from multiple angles in order to produce reliable knowledge.

Currently, Service Science involves researchers from various academic backgrounds, predominantly from the IS and SMM disciplines, all researching complementary aspects of service. In contrast to this strong vision for an integrated Service Science field, we can observe from special interest groups, journal papers, and conferences that research on service is still largely fragmented and carried out by disjoint academic service communities. So far, service science cannot be seen as an integrated research area since only few research results span the boundaries between the involved disciplines. This huge gap currently leads to fragmented, if not contradictory, research endeavours that need to be overcome in order to advance scientific research and enable new business opportunities for organizations in the area of smart service.

With the conference, we envision to offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, involving academic scholars and business practitioners. Topics will include how digital technologies: (a) foster digital service innovation, (b) enhance technology-based service systems (CPS), and (c) enable new data-driven service.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) funds the conference.