By Raymond P. Fisk and Linda Alkire (née Nasr), Texas State University
We are very pleased to share with the SERVSIG community our reflections on the 2018 Frontiers in Service Conference and to announce the many awards given at the conference.
Overview
On September 6-9, 2018 The McCoy College of Business at Texas State University hosted the 27th Frontiers in Service Conference in Austin, Texas. The Conference Co-Chairs were Raymond Fisk, Linda Alkire, Sidney Anderson, and Steven Rayburn.
The Frontiers conference was held at the Hilton Austin and featured 17 plenary speakers and 143 concurrent presentations. It attracted attendees from 32 countries that presented their latest research on important service topics such as service technology, base of the pyramid service, service design, transformative service research, customer experience, service strategy, service management, financial well-being, health care, social media, service innovation, and service failure. The plenary conference speakers brought unique perspectives to how service can improve lives.
The 2018 Frontiers in Service Conference was designed with three through lines to create an interesting and smooth service experience:
- The Primary Through Line was Transformation
Photo 1 : Transformation
From start to finish the 2018 Frontiers in Service Conference conveyed stories of transformation. Transformation was also demonstrated by our efforts to improve the gender balance with 7 women and 10 men as plenary speakers. We hope future Frontiers Conference co-chairs will continue working to improve the gender balance of their plenary speakers at Frontiers Conferences. We are also happy to point out that our 2018 Frontiers in Service Conference featured the first all women plenary session and it was the first plenary conference session. Further, every plenary conference session explored various aspects of transformation.
We even performed a minor transformation for an Iranian doctoral student who was denied a travel visa to the United States because of her place of birth. We set up a conference room for SKYPE presentation, so that Niloofar Borghei Razavi at the Henley Business School, UK could present her research via Skype.
- The Second Through Line was Collaboration
We featured three team plenary presentations:
Laurie Anderson and Amy Ostrom from Arizona State University, the pioneering women behind the transformative service research movement presented their research together.
Brian McCoy and Meagan McCoy Jones presented their management of McCoy’s Building Supply as the first father-daughter business executives.
Len Berry (Texas A & M University) and Bob Riney (Henry Ford Health System) gave us a profound conversation on transforming health care (between two friends) — a senior service scholar and a senior service executive.
Photo 2: Len Berry and Bob Riney
Various forms of collaboration were repeatedly emphasized across each plenary session presentation. As examples:
The McCoys discussed their collaboration with employees, which supports serving customers.
Elizabeth Teisberg encouraged the audience to consider collaboration with her Value Institute for Health and Care at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School.
Jim Spohrer (IBM’s open source Artificial Intelligence (AI)) described the many collaborations that open source software enables.
All of the presentations on Sunday morning concerned possible collaborations with the larger service research community.
David Bowen (Faculty Emeritus, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Scholar at Large) moderated the session and gave a comically amazing introduction to Parsu Parasuraman (University of Miami) and Mary Jo Bitner (Arizona State University). Those who attended will forever more remember Parsu and Mary Jo as twins! Parsu shared his efforts to create a consortium of service research centers and Mary Jo described the Responsible Research for Business and Management, which is a global and cross-disciplinary movement that she helped start.
In the last session, four directors of international leading service centers (Thomas Hollmann, Center for Service Leadership at Arizona State University, USA; Per Kristensson, Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden; Kristina Heinonen, Director of the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS) at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland; and Xiucheng Fan, Director of the Center for Service Marketing & Management at Fudan University, China) shared their insights and centers’ aspirations for responsible service research.
- The Third Through Line was Uplifting Emotions
Throughout the Frontiers Conference, each plenary speaker focused on aspects of the most positive and uplifting of human emotions, especially the emotion of respecting dignity.
Uplifting emotions was also the essence of the Texas State VocaLibre choral group performance Saturday night at the Palmer Events Center.
Under the expert guidance of Craig Aamot (the Choral Director), VocaLibre demonstrated that the performing arts are remarkably good at inspiring and nurturing the human spirit!
Photo 3: Saturday night Event with Austin Skyline
We want to congratulate once again all the award recipients. It was a real pleasure hosting the awards dinner and celebrating the various service awards received:
Frontiers 2017 – Best Practitioner paper award
Photo 9: The American Innovation Index, Gina Woodall (Rockbridge Associates, Inc., USA), Lerzan Aksoy (Fordham University, USA), Tor Andreassen (Norwegian School of Economics, Norway), Charles Colby (Rockbridge Associates, Inc., USA) and Timothy Keiningham (St. John’s University, USA)
Most importantly, We also want to extend our gratitude to Texas State University, The McCoy College of Business, SERVSIG for their support. A special thank you to Provost Gene Bourgeois and Dean Denise Smart for their warm welcome speeches and continuous support.
Photo 15: ASU Graduates
We also want to thank the members of the conference committee: Lerzan Aksoy, Bart Lariviere, Charles Colby, Paul Messinger, and Jochen Wirtz, for their work and diligence in reviewing all the submitted abstracts. Finally, the conference wouldn’t have happened without our brilliant participants. Thank you for bringing and sharing your ideas, enthusiasm, and thoughts!
Photo 16: CTF team
Photo 17: Participants
Photo 18: Participants
As conference co-chairs, we should note that was the largest conference ever hosted by Texas State University! We are truly overwhelmed by all the appreciation and kindness we have received. The service community is one of the warmest, friendliest, and appreciative communities. It was our honor to bring the Frontiers Conference to Texas.
We look forward to the next Frontiers in Service Conference in Singapore on July 18-21,2019 and we hope to see many of you there!
Please visit our Frontiers Conference website for more detailed information — http://www.frontiers2018.com/.
Get to the gallery to the photos of the event here
