Introduction to JAME Special Issue on QUIS 13

Abstract

We welcome you for the fourth time to a special issue on QUIS. Quis (Quality in Services) is an organization founded in 1988 by service researchers at Arizona State University, Karlstad University, and Warwick Business School who wanted to bring together the growing international community involved in studying services marketing and management. QUIS has grown over the years to now be considered as the world's leading biannual symposium on service research and brings together the best interdisciplinary academic research and management practice from around the world. This year's symposium, QUIS 13, drew more than 200 attendees from over 30 countries presenting 130 competitive papers. It was held in June, 2013 at Karlstad University which was also the site of the first QUIS conference in 1988.In this issue we again offer five of the best papers that we think will be of interest to our readers as management scholars. Emphasizing the world wide interest in services and the management of service organizations, these papers we selected are written by authors from six different nations, none of which is the United States. These show the importance and extent of the work being done outside the USA on services. The first two papers are focused on the increasing research interest in how manufacturing organizations are expanding their strategic focus to incorporate the service component of their product offerings. The first of these is "A Novel Categorization of Industrial Services- Analysis of Service Offerings of Manufacturing Companies" by Heini Lehtonen and Hanna Kostama of Aalto University's School of Science in Finland. This paper presents a managerially oriented, yet theory-based, industrial service classification that can be used as a practical tool for structuring, analyzing, comparing and communicating industrial service portfolios that the authors term COIN. The second paper on the topic of integrating services into a product organization's innovation strategy is "New Service Development in Manufacturing Firms: Do the Basic Rules Apply?" by Lars Witell, Linkoping University, Sweden, Bo Edvardsson, Karlstad University, Sweden, Thomas Meiren, Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering, Germany, Adrienne Schafer, University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses about new service development (NSD) in manufacturing firms. This study investigated 785 NSD projects to learn the role of the NSD strategy, how to use resources, how to organize, and the development process to use. …