SERVSIG is proud to announce Lorena Blasco-Arcas as the new Engagement Officer of the SERVSIG board. The Engagement Officer is responsible to design new engagement initiatives and to serve as a channel for other members’ initiatives to tighten and expand the community. The officer helps in identifying initiatives and potential collaboration opportunities with individuals and organizations that share SERVSIG’s values and objectives. We invited Lorena to introduce herself, so you get to know her better.
I am happy to take on my role as an engagement officer to the SERVSIG community. I want to thank Sertan Kabadayi and Kristina Heinonen for their invitation to join the SERVSIG board in this capacity, and to express my gratitude to the rest of the board members for their warm welcome.
Let me take this opportunity to introduce myself first. I am Lorena Blasco-Arcas, and currently, I am an Associate Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School in the Madrid Campus. I never thought I would end up in academia, as my background is in classical music. In fact, I tried to resist the academic path as much as possible, as my family has a long tradition of educators. In the end, it was somehow unavoidable. My first publication dates from my nine years old – a short piece in a local pedagogical journal- and it was probably back then when I discovered that reading and writing (together with music, as I am an accomplished pianist) were my great passions, as they helped me appease my wild curiosity about everything and better understand the world around me. After university graduation in both classical music and business degrees, I worked for a while as an arts manager at different film and art festivals, and as an artistic director in a theatre. Still, my strong interest in research and pedagogy won over managerial practice. I pursued my Ph.D. at the University of Zaragoza in Spain and then moved to work at ESCP Business School.
When we discussed with Kristina and Sertan the possibility of creating an engagement officer position for our community and they offered me fulfilling that role, I could not be more excited. As an engagement scholar focused on looking at engagement at the individual and collective levels, I know how important it is to provide the proper context and platforms for humans to engage with each other and create tight bonds that impact their well-being and collective value creation. SERVSIG is an amazing community of researchers that prides itself on being flexible, open, and fun. It has become more global over the years, with members from different countries across the globe and many transnational collaborations. We think that we can still grow in three aspects: (1) tighten the bonds of the members of the community, (2) expand our support network in those regions/countries that traditionally are less represented in our community, and (3) explore new initiatives of engagement with other organizations with similar values and objectives.
Consequently, my goal as the SERVSIG engagement officer is to work towards those objectives, developing new engagement initiatives to strengthen and create more engagement opportunities with current and potential new members in our community and also serving as a channel for those engagement initiatives that may emerge from SERVSIG members.
Being a member of the SERVSIG Board is a great privilege and honor and I am very thankful to the SERVSIG board members for the opportunity. I am looking forward to serving this great community in this newly created role and working with all the SERVSIG members, many of whom I admire and consider great role models.
If you want to know more or if you have any engagement initiative for the community you want to share, I’d love to hear from you! Just e-mail me: lblasco@escp.eu
Lorena Blasco-Arcas
Associate Professor of Marketing
ESCP Business School, Madrid Campus
