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The Royal Society has recently published the findings of a major study on the role of science in services sector innovation. Entitled Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation , the report highlights the wider significance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to the services sector, which makes up around three quarters of the UK economy. Hidden Wealth concludes that STEM is deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is often hidden. Although STEM is important in services sector innovation now, it is also likely to play an important part in the future of services, as many services are on the cusp of a transition to more personalised and interconnected systems, which will require significant advances in STEM.

This report from the Royal Society was cited by Irving Wladawsky-Berger at http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2009/08/hidden-wealth-science-technology-and-services-innovation-in-the-21st-century.html .

Excerpt: 6.6.6 A systems-based approach to understanding services. One solution may lie in the wider adoption of systems-based approaches to understanding services. A more systematic approach to studying services should result in better design, management and understanding of services and, at the same time, provide a suitable context in which to integrate disciplines such as social sciences, management science, economics and STEM. These sorts of educational programmes may particularly benefit firms who do not require graduates with deep knowledge in one of the existing disciplines. [p. 61] However, we note that when this has been attempted in the past, as with systems science and complexity theory -- both of which have existed for several decades and have been widely applied in scientific, engineering and social science contexts -- the tendency has been for people to organise themselves into disciplinary silos, with the result that the desired new interdisciplinary approaches have struggled to impose themselves. [pp. 61-62] The emerging Service Science, Manufacturing and Engineering (SSME) or 'Service Science' concept is also intended to join up a broad range of disciplines, but is specifically concerned with ensuring that graduates are better equipped for the workplace. Service Science may ultimately help the development of multi-disciplinary capabilities but in this regard SSME programmes seem to have been slow to emerge and only partially successful to date. A more profitable approach to redesigning academic curricula and delivery (at least as far as services are concerned) may be to focus in on service design, which seeks to understand the delivery of services from a user perspective and to develop better solutions (see Box 4.3 on page 40). Developments such as the Masters course in Service Design, Management and Innovation offered by the University of Manchester Centre for Service Research might provide good models for new courses, and should be closely mon