Research and education in service science management and engineering: the case of the Italian Service Management Forum

The paper describes an initiative carried out on the Italian territory, the ASAP Service Management Forum, as an exemplary practice contributing to spreading the service management culture across firms as well as cross-fertilizing good practices and the development of joint academia-practitioners’s research and education initiative. Within the ASAP Service Management Forum community, in particular, an extensive study has been carried out about the competence needed for service management roles and the professional lifelong training activities carried out at company level. Moreover, an analysis of the educational activities carried out at the M.Sc. or post-master level in Italy and abroad has been carried out. The results of these studies show that despite the growing interest and development of activities and educational activities in the field there is still a largely untapped potential in this area.