Service science spans many disciplines such as business, management, computation, and human-machine interactions. This book is about the science of services. It has a collection of experiences from the last decade in Japan in service science. Japan has taken a fresh look at service science. The book has perspectives including education, foundation, methods, designs, technology, and industry. It discusses the challenges and experiences in finding solutions from each perspective.

The book is organized in eight parts. The first part introduces the book. Part 2, on foundations, has three chapters. The service innovation model has six layers, from management logic to support system to customer services to the outcome of innovation. It provides examples of innovation by two award-winning companies. It discusses models of customer process, where the customer process is considered as a value creator along with the firm process. Through examples, it advocates dynamic updates and contextualization for evolving the customer processes. This part of the book also has a chapter on human behavior observations. The chapter records data collection, data analysis, and improvements in various projects of human behavior observations. The next chapter describes interactive computer simulation as a method to design service systems.

Part 3, on methods, has four chapters. The chapter on community-based participatory service engineering recognizes a group of customers and employees as a community. It illustrates the use of a Bayesian network model for computation on big data for various types of services. The next chapter proposes a methodology of workshop-based innovative system design. The methodology uses systems engineering principles. The next chapter is on the wants chain analysis (WCA) method. The method takes the diversity of people’s needs into account.

The fourth part is on design, having two chapters. The first chapter presents a value co-creation design framework, and applies it to the tourism industry. The next chapter presents a platform for the value co-creation process and the value orchestration process with details.

Part 5 is on technology. It has four chapters describing various computational technologies used in service science. The first chapter is on machine learning applied to service repairs in the railways. The second chapter gives a survey of agent-based simulation applied to simulate social services data. The third chapter proposes an information supervisory control model for discrete simulation, applied to nursing services. The fourth chapter presents analysis of human activities by extracting equations from wristband data.

Part 6, on industry, has four chapters. The first chapter is on changes in industry because of the spread of services. The second chapter discusses creative services in Japan. The discussion includes characteristics of creative services and case studies. The third chapter is on decision support services and the role of citation-based tools for knowledge management in such services. The last chapter is on applying research methods such as questionnaires, surveys, and interviews in the industry.

Part 7 is on the education of service science. The first chapter describes experience in developing a pictorial/textual course on service science. The second chapter describes a curriculum developed to teach service science as partial fulfillment toward a master of business administration degree.

Part 8 describes a road map of service science by the associated ministry in Japan.

The book considers service science as a part of management studies. However, the curriculum of service science also contains courses on databases, data mining, simulation, accounting, and marketing. Readers with interests in applications of computing technologies will find many chapters useful. Each chapter can be read independently. The major emphasis in service science appears to be on provider-customer value co-creation.