In 2023, the inaugural Mary Jo Bitner “Rising Star in Services” Award was awarded to Kejia Hu and Kaisa Koskela-Huotari. These individuals were recognized for their significant contributions to the services discipline early in their careers. The award ceremony took place at the QUIS18 conference held at VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam
The Mary Jo Bitner “Rising Star in Services” Award has been created to honor a junior scholar who has started making significant contributions to the services discipline early in her / his career. Service scholars who have received PhD during the last 5 years are eligible for this award.
Regarding Mary-Jo Bitner: Mary Jo Bitner is one of the founders of the service marketing discipline, committing her career to the study of customer satisfaction in service encounters, customer-employee interactions, servicescapes, and technology-delivered service.
Among many honors, Professor Bitner has received the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award from the American Marketing Association’s SERVSIG, an IBM Faculty Award, the MMA Marketing Innovator Award and ISSIP’s inaugural Fellow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Service Science. In 2019 she was awarded an honarary doctorate from the Hanken School of Business in Helsinki, Finland and was awarded the 2020 PhD Alumnus of the year award from the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle
