Gratitude

As ISSIP’s acting treasurer since 2012, I would personally like to thank the organizations and individuals who have donated and supported ISSIP’s efforts to encourage service innovation in our interconnected world.

In ISSIP’s first ten years of operating (2012-2022), ISSIP’s donations primarily came from a few large founding organizations with strong and sustained efforts related to technology-driven service system innovations. The top five sources of income included (1) Cisco Systems, (2) IBM, (3) National Science Foundation (NSF), (4) Japan Science & Technology (JST), (5) Conferences (e.g., Frontiers), and over sixteen others including: Empirica (Europen Union), General Electric (GE), Jim Spohrer, San Jose State University (SJSU), Fraunhofer (Germany), Ciena, University of Salerno (Italy), University of Washington Tacoma (UWaT), University of Gachon (South Korea), University of Warwick (United Kingdom), VTT (Finland), Yassi Moghaddam, UIDP, and others.

From 2023 to 2025, the top five donors include, (1) Institute for Service Design (IfSD) at the University of Hamburg, Germany led by Prof. Markus Warg, (2) Service Systems Enterprise Engineering Department at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) led by Prof. Vittal Prabhu, (3) “Cognitive Service Systems Research Unit” at Fraunhofer in Germany led by Jens Neuhuttler, (4) Business Analytics Department at University of Washington, Tacoma led by Prof. Michael Turek, and (5) the Kwan Family Foundation lead by Prof. Stephen Kwan, and over twenty others who make donations via Benevity (platform to log volunteer hours), Zeffy (platform for individual donations), or deposits to ISSIP’s bank account. Donations via Benevity and logged volunteer hours include – special thanks to Christine Ouyang (IBM), Yueming Xu (IBM), Jeff Welser (IBM), Warner de Gooijer (Cisco), Annie Hardy (Cisco), Heather Yurko (Mastercard), and others. Donations via Zeffy and individual giving include – special thanks to Matthew Seaman, Jennifer Reed, Yassi Moghaddam, Haluk Demirkan, Terri Griffith, Christine Ouyang, Frank Melis, Adhishri Parikh, Maggie Qian, Marietta Baba, Jan-Simon Veicht, Michele Carroll, Michel Leonard, and others.

Learn more about donating to ISSIP here. The exciting recent change is that every month ISSIP is adding new donors thanks to Benevity and Zeffy. The Benevity online platform enables individuals working in many organizations to log their volunteer hours and get a matched donation to their non-profit of choice from their employers charitable giving program. The Zeffy online platform allows individuals and leaders of organizations to donate directly any time they derive benefits from being a participant in the ISSIP community of practice. These donations help sustain ISSIP’s operations as described more fully below.

The image below summarizes the donations and spending in these two periods.

The primary expenses include a part-time executive director, expense reimbursements of the executive director (professional marketing service, including website, social media, newsletter, PR, etc.), conferences and awards, as well as contributions to the ISSIP Foundation. Clearly, the part-time executive director roles is extremely important as described in the ISSIP Handbook and here as well. Since 2023 to present, ISSIP is lucky to have Michele Carroll as our current part-time executive director. I also want to thank Yassi Moghaddam who was ISSIP’s founding part-time executive director (2012-2022), and now an active member of ISSIP’s Board of Directors. The part-time executive director leads day-to-day operations and fund raising via strategic partnerships with organizations and individuals. Day-to-day operations include working closely with volunteer leaders and teams, especially ISSIP’s President and Vice President, as well as past Presidents and Board Members who make up the ISSIP’s Executive Committee.

Since the founding of ISSIP in 2012, the long-term goal has been to ultimately fund ISSIP operations from returns of a $2.5M endowment, which currently stands at just 1% of that level (or $25K). In the next decade, I will be investing more of my personal efforts to look for 25 organizations and individuals willing to invest $100K each, one time, in the ISSIP Foundation for service innovation futures, and ISSIP. After identifying these 25 organizations and individuals (which may take years) who are willing to donate if others donate, and after the key new ISSIP programs like service innovation professional certification are in place, and with the help of ISSIP legal and accounting experts, simultaneously the shift will be made to operating off the ISSIP Foundation endowment. This has been our ISSIP long-term goal from the start.

Why does ISSIP not charge a fee for membership?
ISSIP does not have members like most professional associations. Instead, we have participants in a community of practice. Volunteers are helping each other. That is ISSIP at its core; to give-get-grow. In fact, ISSIP encourages participants to be members of other professionals associations. So many professional associations have a Service SIG (Special Interest Group). So many professional associations charge an annual membership fee to their members to pay for their executive director and operations. See for example this post from 2012 and this post and this post.

Should ISSIP charge a fee for membership?
No, but. No, because we encourage ISSIP participants to be members of professional associations like INFORMS and IEEE and others that do charge a membership fee. Why charge an individual person twice? But, what ISSIP should charge a fee for is some kind of “service innovation certification” of great value in people’s careers for jobs and promotions. That has to be developed and is a great opportunity for a partner organization to connect with ISSIP. The foundations have already been put in place with the ISSIP AICollab course work.

Is ISSIP cool?
Probably not to most people, especially those who do not understand the complexity of complex interconnected service systems in business and society, the fundamentals of service and service innovation, as well as what a service innovation professional strives to become – a lifelong learner who is a T-shaped adaptive innovator. So, in short, a ‘service innovation professional’ is not a cool title to most people. Cool professional associations require two things. First, a job role. Imagine a high-demand job role in companies that every executive and manager in that company is desperately trying to hire – like product manager, data scientist, AI professional, service designer, UX designer, quantum computer specialist, etc. Second, cool requires an associated academic discipline. The academic discipline should perfectly align with the job role, of course. Every university president and dean would be interested in making sure their university had such an academic discipline, so graduates would be quickly hired by industry. Before AI became so popular, it was a Data Scientist – that was considered a cool new academic discipline. Chasing what is cool is not what ISSIP is about. Service is fundamental, and service innovation professionals are T-shaped adaptive innovators – deep in one area of technology, business, social sciences, etc. but with breadth to communicate across disciplines is the goal of being part of the ISSIP community of practice. Probably the only enduring cool profession and job role is entrepreneur. A T-shaped adaptive innovator, who is a service innovation professional, is probably as close as possible to an enduring cool profession. Failure rates for entrepreneurs are high, but that is the price of passionately trying to create a new service innovation. Service innovations often use emerging technologies to scale up access to new capabilities, new business models to scale up access to benefits, institutional arrangements to scale down potential harms to stakeholders, the environment, and future generations, while aiming to improve win-win interactions and change.

Is service innovation cool?
About once every 20 years service innovation becomes a hot topic, and then it is cool (pun intended). In the 1950s, the service sector became larger than manufacturing in the US economy – so economist and politicians took notice. In the 1970s, technology-enabled service automation based on computing was all the rage – including ATM (Automatic Teller Machines) for banks – so business leaders took notice. In the 1990s, the internet and world-wide-web enabled online service – government, industry, and academics took notice. By 2010, the smartphone had appeared enabling mobile, online service, and access to platform-based service innovations from anywhere – again government, industry, and academics took notice and worked to transform citizen, customer, student, and employee experience. Service innovation will become cool again around (probably around) 2030, with really smart AI, driverless vehicles, humanoid robots, and more enable – truly intelligent, technology-based service that has finally solved the 3 Es problems: Energy, Errors, and Ethics. We will see.

Why ISSIP?
See here.
“Because the 21st century world needs T-shaped people. ISSIP has a focus on helping industry (institutional sponsors) find student teams to do smart service system innovation projects supervised by faculty and industry mentors, on topics of mutual interest.” ISSIP provides a community of practice, programs, platforms and leadership and volunteer opportunities for participants to increase their eminence at all career stages – student, professional, retiree.