A Framework that Situates Technology Research Within the Field of Service Science

Service science strives to bring together many disciplines (including computer science, cognitive science, economics, organizational behavior, human resources management, marketing, operations research, and others) in an attempt to study service systems in the following ways: understanding what service systems are and how they evolve; studying how to invest in order to improve management practices in service systems; determining how to create new technologies that increase the scaling of service systems; and, establishing a basis for assessing and relating relevant interdisciplinary knowledge within this emerging field. Academic and industry researchers from separate and currently mostly isolated disciplines are each approaching the field of service science from their own perspectives. This chapter presents a framework that technology researchers can use to understand and articulate how their research relates to the field of service science. The result will better enable technology researchers to relate to and engage with other researchers in the interdisciplinary field of service science.