“We are at an incredible tipping point for the world economy and it’s all around innovation,” said Nick Donofrio, Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, IBM Corporation. “Innovation requires new skills to ensure that people, countries and economies remain competitive in this globally integrated world, and by investing in initiatives like Service Science, Management and Engineering, IBM and India will provide those skills.”

Signing the MoU, Professor Rammohan Rao, Dean, ISB said, “A strong industry –academia partnership is extremely important for us to provide management education that is relevant and current. I am sure that IBM and the ISB together can conduct cutting edge research that will be immediately applicable in India, and also successfully replicated elsewhere in the world. The ISB is proud to be associated with IBM for pioneering this research in India.”

“The aim of this agreement is to support ISB to open the SSME Program which includes high-end research, development of case studies and curriculum for the Executive Education and the Post Graduate Program in Management with the help of IBM so that the discipline of service science can be developed and lead to nurturing specialized human resources,” said Dr. Daniel M Dias, Director, IBM India Research Laboratory.
Professor Viswanadham, Executive Director, Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies (GLAMS) at the ISB said, ”With 30 % of our economy dependent on it, the service sector plays a very important role in the Indian economy. The Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies will explore innovative possibilities to streamline, transform and automate processes and develop human resources to deliver services more efficiently. The study will focus on service chains connected with ITES, Retail, Textiles, Logistics, Supply Chain Finance, Human Resource Management, Business Services and others.”

Service Science, Management and Engineering:

The world economy is experiencing the largest labor force migration in history, driven by an environment altered by broader global communications, growth of emerging markets and technology innovation. Services now accounts for more than 50 percent of the labor force in Brazil, Russia, Japan and Germany and over 75 percent of the labor force in India, the United States and the United Kingdom. This shift to services has created a skills gap, especially in the area of high value services, and many leading universities across the globe have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world.

The new interdisciplinary academic field “Service Science, Management and Engineering,” or SSME, aims at studying, improving and teaching services innovation. The goal of the SSME discipline is to drive productivity, quality, and sustainability of services, while making the learning rates and innovation rates more predictable across the service sector, especially in complex organization to organization services including business to business, nation to nation and government to population. This new academic discipline brings together ongoing work in fields of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social, cognitive and legal sciences, to develop skills required in a services-led economy.

This first-of-a-kind SSME collaboration in India, offers an academic way of understanding interactions between client and provider, using a mix of scientific and business concepts to focus on areas that might not be core in either a Masters of Business Administration or computer-science program.

Since 2004, IBM has spearheaded a series of initiatives, inviting hundreds of faculty from universities around the world, in a call to action. Many leading universities across the globe have begun exploring and investing in this area, working in tandem with thought leaders in the business world. This services science initiative will strengthen IBM’s ability to help develop future services skills in this region while providing solutions to meet the needs of the evolving Indian economy in an increasingly services-based worldwide economy.