Foreword of Service Exploration Theories and Processes

Service Science was launched by IBM as an open code initiative more than ten years ago in an attempt to integrate different knowledge domains contributing to the study and better understanding of service systems. Since the preliminary proposals, it was clear that the organization, functioning, and development of service systems had to be based on a new conceptualization of services, on relationship governance, and on a new qualification of value generation, as service research has pointed out all along the last decades of scientific production.