From June 17-19, 2016 the Department of Marketing & Supply Chain Management and the Service Science Factory, Maastricht University’s School of Business and Economics (SBE), hosted the world’s largest service research conference with 266 participants from different continents. Service marketing has been a focus of SBE since its inception and we are proud that the Department of Marketing & Supply Chain Management has a standing reputation in research and education in this area. In this spirit, SBE established the Service Science Factory to bridge academia and practice around service innovation and design, and fosters research on smart services at the Business Intelligence & Smart Services Institute in the region.
Before the conference kicked-off, over 45 participants took part in highly interactive pre-conference workshops on service innovation, Smart PLS or R. At night the welcome reception took place in one of the beautiful buildings of the 16th century in the inner city ‘La Bonbonnière’.
Participants received their conference package including the upcycled rice bag (www.mynameiskumar.org), serving as a conference bag. On behalf of the conference committee Gaby Odekerken welcomed all participants and acknowledged that Maastricht University is probably the first to host both conferences Frontiers (2002) and SERVSIG (2016).
After the plenary welcome session on Saturday morning, Timothy Keinighman and Lerzan Akzoy shared the importance of share of wallet in the services industry. Manuel Koser, one of Maastricht’s alumni and entrepreneur in South Africa, argued that doing business with the bottom of the pyramid requires radical service innovations and might shift attention to share of voice. In numerous parallel presentations, we witnessed that services have evolved into the dominant economic sector almost reaching two-thirds of GDP worldwide. 
Services can best be defined as experiences created in interactions within complex service networks of service employee, service customers and many other stakeholders. As a consequence of the experiential nature of services the service research community is by definition multidisciplinary and extends across such diverse disciplines as marketing, human resource management, innovation, strategy, information systems and operations management. The eclectic nature of service research can also be witnessed from the diversity of tracks in the SERVSIG 2016 program. In addition, a number of exciting novel themes emerged, such as transformative research focusing on health and well-being, new technologies (e.g. mobile, sensors, neuroscanners, etc), digital services and data analytics (e.g., text, picture, video and voice analysis). The ‘interact with the editor’ session also resulted in a call for societally relevant research themes and diverging research methods.
The conference dinner took place at a beautiful location at the banks of the river Meuse. Participants enjoyed a lovely dinner, while catching up and enjoying the gorgeous scenery. This year, the award ceremony included a SERVSIG dissertation award of €1.500,- sponsored by Maastricht University. After the award ceremony participants either enjoyed the outdoor terrace or the vibrant dancefloor with live music from the Driven band! We really felt like one big services research community and partied till the band called it a day.
On Sunday morning, participants loved the barista even better and had ample opportunity to attend one of the parallel presentations. After lunch the plenary session illustrated the needs of refugees in Europe, told by an emotional story of one of the regional refugees. His pictures described the complexity of the service system that refugees are confronted with. Ray Fisk made a bridge to service research and made several suggestions for future research. The Twitter wall showed highly relevant questions that this touching session evoked.
The closing social event on Sunday night kicked off by a 15 minutes bus drive to Belgium, where we had a guided tour in the Caves of Kanne, followed by a candle light dinner and award ceremony of the JSM, JSTP and Grönroos award. It was great to hear that participants enjoyed the high service level, eye for detail and finishing touch of this magnificent event. Being the host of SERVSIG is an incredible privilege, great team effort, but above all extremely rewarding to facilitate this event for our amazing service research community! Every single step was worth the effort!
Impressions from the Pre-Workshop (for mobile click here)
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Impressions from the Conference (for mobile click here)
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