I first got exposed to service science while at Hult on my MBA program. Brilliant professors and just cool guys Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings were those visionary guys who brought the subject to the business school. They gathered together the best minds from our MBA class. It was truly diverse multicultural and multiexperience community. We firsts learnt the basics: the six principles of service thinking which laid the foundation of Hunter’s and Jeff’s future book. The six principles are: 1) co-creation of value, 2) service systems, 3) componentised business architecture, 4) global-mobile-social, or Glo-Mo-So as we used to call it, 5) Run-Transform-Innovate, 6) multisided metrics. Later on the seventh principles was added to the framework: service=experience.
Having spent four weeks learning the basics we moved to practice. We were split into teams and assigned to different companies and different mentors. We worked for IBM, Cisco, SAP and ISSIP. Some of us worked on gamification, some on Watson initiative, others on social collaboration platforms. My team worked with a brilliant scientist, service champion and business expert Jim Spohrer. Jim was the guy who started his day answering emails somewhere at 5am or even earlier. Interestingly, being so busy he always had time to tweet something, answer emails, Skype calls and even in-person meetings. This project was a c0-creation of value at its best. We were able to utilise the best frameworks to answer the most beneficial solution to the problem.
Our project with service innovation principles ended with a Hackathon at IBM Innovation Center in Santa Clara were we met a lot of IBMers who shared their experiences and ideas with us. An unforgettable and great experience!
Roman Osypenko Blog 