Service Management Conference in Pärnu drew attention to the development of service domain

From June 8^th-12^th, 2014, the research symposium IRSSM5 was held at the University of Tartu, Pärnu College. This was the first IRSSM conference held in Europe.  IRSSM (International Research Symposium on Service Management) is the event initiated by Professor Jay Kandampully (Ohio State University) with the intention to popularize the domain of service management.

The conference was held in Europe for the first time, the previous ones took place in Mauritius, Indonesia, China and India. Its specific feature is the small number of participants (Professor Kandampully wishes to keep it below one hundred) to make it comfortable for participants to communicate with each other. It is a principle that supports getting to research collaboration. This year over 60 delegates from 19 countries participated. The delegates were from the USA, Australia, Argentina, UK, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

The first day of the conference was dedicated to master and doctoral students – the presentations by four experts of service management domain focused on the principles of scientific research, particularities of service management domain were included (presentation slides and videos: Research Workshop).

The keynote speaker of the conference was Professor Christian Grönroos (Hanken School of Economics) from Finland. Grönroos is an acknowledged expert on service and relationship marketing. In his presentation he emphasized the need for paying attention to service management domain distributively from marketing, as the thought patterns characteristic to classical (product-based) marketing are not suitable in the case of services. On the second day of the conference, the panel discussion of the entrepreneurs was held (participants: Andrus Aljas, Estonia Spa Hotels AS; Kari Maripuu, M-Meedia OÜ; Mart Maasik, SEB). The entrepreneurs shared a common viewpoint that service development has to be of paramount importance for creating competitive advantage.

The panel discussion of researchers held on the third day (Professor Alison Dean, Newcastle University, Australia; Professor Bo Enquist, Karlstadt University, Sweden; Professor Jay Kandampully, Ohio State University, USA; Professor Jaqueline Pels, University Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina; Heiko Gebauer, EAWAG, Switzerland; Melanie Smith, BKF University of Applied Sciences,  Hungary) focused on the topics of academic and research collaboration in service management domain.

The next conference will be held from August 11^th-15^th, 2015 in Malaysia. It will be hosted by MARA University of Technology.

Additional information, presentation slides and videos: http://www.irssm5.pc.ut.ee/.