The services sector is a major economic factor in industrialized countries and is showing very high growth rates in the developing world. Despite this, services are often regarded as a mere add-on to the more established industrial and agricultural sectors. Many have yet to recognize that in a service-based economy, services are products in their own right. Consequently, management and engineering practices in academia and industry have only recently been adjusted to the specifics of services.

While such necessary developments have been welcome, it is becoming increasingly clear that they do not adequately respond to service-related challenges. Management, marketing, computer science and new fields such as service engineering are addressing service-related topics more and
more. They are taking the specific characteristics of services into account, namely the fact that they are intangible, require customer integration and involve simultaneous production and consumption. However, since these disciplinary approaches are not generally integrated, they fail to cover the complexity of the business environment in which services are created and delivered today. For this reason, skills and knowledge must be integrated in a comprehensive manner. To achieve optimal solutions, research and teaching must include additional disciplines such as sociology, psychology and mathematics.

In short, we need a Services Science that bundles and recombines practical and academic fields to identify and address open areas in service research and teaching. It should also develop targetoriented curricula and tackle unexploited commercial potential.