Developing innovative services and launching them successfully in international markets - these are major challenges for enterprises and national economies which aim to benefit from the opportunities of the service sector by achieving more growth and employment. Those enterprises and sites which succeed in creating "a special service experience" by offering outstanding service solutions and by exc- lent performance in service delivery to the customer will be successful in compe- tion. Nevertheless, it is exactly the current discussion about innovation, parti- larly in Germany, which reveals that we do not primarily suffer from a lack of good ideas but rather that the translation of new findings and ideas into new s- vices, products and processes must be substantially improved. All in all, it is obviously very urgent to increase innovative ability and to accel- ate the speed of innovation. Progress on this path can be accelerated if science and research increasingly face up to the challenges of how to improve innovative power in the service sector. In my opinion, service innovations address very d- ferent fields of innovation such as, for example, linking not only new technologies and services, performance and process innovations, but also market-related in- vations, for example, for the establishment of new distribution channels.

The book documents the state-of-the-art in Services Science. It combines contributions in Service Engineering, Service Management and Service Marketing and helps to develop a roadmap for future R & D activities in these fields. The book is written for researchers in engineering and management.