Interdisciplinary Effort Brings Innovation to Services Sector

The Haas School and three other units at UC Berkeley have banded together to develop this burgeoning new field of study, called services sciences. In fact, UC Berkeley was cited last year by the New York Times as one of only a handful of universities in the country conducting research and offering courses in services science.

University of California "We know how to use technology to improve products. What we are beginning to hone is the application of technology to improve services," says Henry Chesbrough, a Haas School adjunct professor involved in services science research and teaching. Chesbrough, Ph.D. 97 and the executive director of the Haas School's Center for Open Innovation, teaches a graduate course on business models for service innovation.

While a traditional view of services has centered on haircuts and hamburgers, services science aims to improve performance in such complex fields as transportation, health care, and marketing by tapping into knowledge-intensive disciplines such as technology, engineering, and management. To do so, the university formed the UC Berkeley Services Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) program, a teaching and research collaboration between the Haas School, the School of Information, the School of Engineering, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

"Our curriculum will develop experts able to innovate service by creating new organizational models and business processes that improve capacity and increase understanding of customers," says Ravi Nemana, executive director of the SSME program. For example, "Someone with expertise in services science might figure out a new way to use an existing technology, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, to improve patient care in a hospital, develop new information tools for consulting, or model complex chains of services to find business opportunities."

Along with Chesbrough's course on service innovation, Information and Business Architecture and The Information and Services Economy are already among SSME's current offerings for graduate students, making Berkeley MBA students among the first anywhere to have access to coursework specific to services science. SSME has also launched a lecture series and will roll out a spring information systems clinic in which students will design and deploy services for UC Berkeley clients. Nemana and the SSME advisory board (in addition to Hank Chesbrough; Dean Anna Saxenian, I-School; Rhonda Righter, College of Engineering; Paul Wright, College of Engineering; Bob Glushko, I-School, Shankar Sastry, CITRIS), are also moving toward offering a services science certificate program.

"The SSME curriculum is particularly relevant given that seven out of ten Berkeley MBA students will go to work in the services industry," notes Chesbrough. Adds Nemana, "Every organization needs people with the skills to position it for future profitability. And those essential skills clearly and increasingly need to be in services."

Science Upgrades the Art of Service	Contact Haas
	Science Upgrades the Art of Service