For the past two decades, managing service processes has been an important area of research and practice. Since modern service processes are embedded and/or supported by global information technology (IT) systems, IBM coined the term “service science” to provide a designation for the emerging tools, techniques, methods, and approaches used in service management. Today it is well understood that effective management of service processes increases the economic value of products and services. However, a new nonintuitive notion in service design is emerging, which suggests that focusing on enriching the lives of people using those services leads to a service design that increases the economic value of the firm.

This additional goal of service processes, namely to transform the lives of the service users, radically alters the framing of the service design objectives and necessitates the development of new approaches for designing service processes. In recognition of this change, the phrase “serviceology for services” was coined in 2012. Serviceology for services is a different approach for studying services where the goal of increasing economic value is embedded in improving the quality of life of service recipients, the local neighborhoods, and global communities.

This book is a collection of 38 papers that were presented at the First International Conference on Serviceology, which was held in Tokyo, Japan, in 2012. The objective of the conference was to bring together researchers in academia and industry to share research ideas, projects, and visions of this emerging notion of service management. As a consequence, the papers are varied. That is, a few discuss theory-building research, some are conceptual papers, but most are empirical studies covering a wide array of application areas that include tourism, hospitality, healthcare, public and urban services, and regional development. However, all papers are united by serviceology philosophy, namely service processes are designed with the aim of ensuring the service enriches the lives of service recipients.

This volume offers new key ideas: (1) firms do not create value just by distributing their goods and services to consumers; instead, firms and customers together co-create value for each other; (2) service design should focus on improving the quality of life of service recipients and their communities; (3) service design is an iterative process repeating through the phases of analysis of the operational services process, redesign and simulation of a provisional process, and implementation of the provisional process; (4) capturing service interactions involves creation of new technology or innovative use of existing technology; and (5) data analysis frequently includes advanced modeling techniques.

Every paper in this book is written with care. The authors always start by explaining the problem addressed in the paper. This is followed by a succinct summary of the supporting literature. The approach used to address the problem is then explained, and the last section discusses the findings. Because many of the applications and/or solution approaches are novel, business process practitioners will find that this book adds new understanding of how business processes should be framed and designed. In my judgment, this book should be added to every university’s library.