Editorial Column—Smart Service Systems

Abstract

Last year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a limited funding opportunity for joint university– industry research in the area of smart service systems, fitting new technologies into complex service systems in real-world applications.1 This opportunity aims more at translational research than at basic research, more at moving from discovery to practice than at discovery itself. The initial round of proposals were due in January 2014, and a second round is expected to be due in January 2015. And there are now other NSF opportunities for basic research in creating resilient service systems as well.2 It is exciting to see the NSF beginning to fund research in complex service systems—in service science. Yet this development raises some fundamental questions: What is a service system? What does it mean for a service system to be smart? And what kinds of science and engineering are required to create effective, efficient, and smart service systems? I will touch briefly on these questions here, but in the long run, I expect Service Science will continue to define the field and to provide answers to these and many more questions.