Dr. Jim Spohrer: Service Science is BizTech Innovation

 

Rule-changers are often characterized by wild maverick behavior.  We see them driving a new idea hard, crashing through crowds of people, bodies flying in their wake.  Dr. Jim Spohrer, Director of Service Research at IBM’s Alamaden Research Center, is a different kind of rule-changer.  He is famous for caring as much about people as new ideas, so not surprisingly his latest work is about converging people stuff and technology stuff.  He wants nothing less than a whole new educational regime that combines a half-dozen separate technical, business and social science disciplines into a coherent curriculum taught at the undergraduate and graduate level: Service Science.

A person who studies Service Science will learn as much about organizational behavior, human systems, and economics as she will learn about engineering, logistics, and information technology.  And if you are thinking that this sounds about as easy as throwing a successful party between Math majors and Drama majors, I would agree.  But now is the time for it.  Services – activities where suppliers and buyers must work together to produce value – now employ 70% of the workforce in countries like the US and Japan.  If that many peoples’ jobs depend on understanding services, seems smart to have a major in it – and not just a boutique major like Ancient Yoruba Basketweaving but a big robust major, and hopefully a major that can – this time finally – attract roughly equal numbers from both genders. 

Just as Computer Science was a necessary convergence of Math, Electrical Engineering, and – yeah – Philosophy, Spohrer and a growing army of academics and industry folks believe that Service Science is a necessary convergence of Management Sciences, Computer Science, Economics, Logistics, Game Theory….and let’s throw Law in just for seasoning.

What I really like about this is that it means we will have to start treating business as a science, and science as an inherent part of human systems:  BizTech. 

If you’ve read other thethreepercent.com posts, you might be seeing a pattern about now.  Real innovators are BizTech, and BizTech innovators are about to get their very own major.  About time.

There are heaps of universities – including UC Berkeley, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Penn State, and North Carolina State – starting Service Science programs.  And we are likely to start seeing IBM and others posting “Service Science Certificate Preferred” on job postings.

If your university is running a Service Science program, take a second and put a link to it in comments.

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