Meet the Nominees for ISSIP VP 2027

Please meet the outstanding nominees for ISSIP VP 2026!
ISSIP participants are requested to please vote for one candidate (vote here).

Kevin Clark	Julie Cook	Driton Sahiti

Please see the nominees short bio and positions statements below (in the order they were received as nominations). Remember, please vote for one candidate (vote here)

Kevin Clark

Short Bio

Kevin Clark is an author, keynote speaker, serial entrepreneur, alpine skier and chef. He is Director emeritus, Brand & Values Experience (IBM corporate staff) and the first Brand Steward for IBM ThinkPad notebook computers (today Lenovo). Over the past four decades he has created and managed billions of dollars of intangible value starting at IBM and today with his own companies and clients. Kevin is a sought-after adviser about societal and technology trends, business frameworks and offering innovation, design thinking, organizing ideas and principles (“Strategies Worth Framing”), organization design and transformation, and is an expert brand & experience strategist for categories, companies and market offerings. Today he is President & Federation CEO of Content Evolution, a global federation of companies and professionals connecting “Listening & Leading” to “Intention & Attention” – Chairman & CEO of ChoiceFlows – CEO of platformUX – and co-founder of K2 Enduring Brands and SenseMapping. Kevin is a member, Stimson Center think tank, Loomis Innovation Council – member IEEE P7100 standards drafting group for AI Resources and Sustainability – People-Centered Internet (PCI) Community Forum chair – and PCI Ambassador to the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP). Kevin formed and led the IBM Brand Experience Community and was a member of the Market Intelligence Leadership team, and Market Management Executive Committee. Kevin serves on the board of ChoiceFlows, and the People-Centered Internet (PCI); a senior adviser to Storyvine, Unmudl, and the Iacocca Center for Leadership. Kevin is the coauthor of Collective Intelligence in the Age of AI, Humanity in Motion, Healthcare Robotics & Wellbeing, and a forthcoming book Coherence for Leadership. He has published many peer-reviewed articles about AI, design thinking, human factors, and was lead author of the AHFE award-winning paper “Designing from the Inside Out.” Kevin Clark is an active ISSIP Ambassador who interviewed all ISSIP award winners in 2025, co-led the first ISSIP Treasure Hunt online brainstorming initiative, led a team and authorship of the report ISSIP Horizons Plan to 2031, and is host of the new ISSIP Live! interview series.

Position Statement

My role as Vice President of ISSIP if elected is to support incoming president Christine Ouyang who I respect and consider a friend and professional colleague, and her agenda in 2027. My commitment is to expand the visibility and perceived value of Service Science at-large, ISSIP’s thought leadership for service science in the AI era, grow community engagement, and provide opportunities for everyone to share ideas for increasing our impact in the world. Some of my initiatives and innovations to help ISSIP as an Ambassador include creating and leading the ISSIP Live! series online to help bring service science alive from multiple perspectives, leading the ISSIP Treasure Hunt and ISSIP Horizons Plan to 2031 to encourage engagement, idea sharing, and a roadmap for what’s ahead. My pledge in running for ISSIP Vice President includes continuing to enhance the role and visibility of Service Science, positioning ISSIP as a leader in this growing field, and continue to develop a service innovator ecosystem for the benefit of humanity and drive economic goodwill from our collective intelligence.

Julie Cook

Short Bio

Julie Cook is the Founder and Director of Safe Harbour Enterprises, a Melbourne-based consultancy helping mining and other capital-intensive companies move from asset operators to platform orchestrators. Her interest in service systems began at IBM, where she was drawn in by the Smarter Cities programme and its use of service science to rethink how complex urban systems could work for the people inside them. That early curiosity set the direction for everything that followed: a career spent applying human-centred thinking to industries built around infrastructure and assets, including roles at BCG, BHP, Gold Fields, QSuper, and Deloitte Australia. Julie holds a Master of Design Anthropology from Swinburne University, with executive education from MIT and Australian Institute of company directors. She leads ISSIP’s Resources Sector Vertical Working Group, applying servitisation theory, platform economics, and cybernetic principles to governance challenges in an industry still learning to see itself as anything other than an asset operator. Capital-intensive industries like mining, energy, and infrastructure have long treated service science as someone else’s discipline, useful for software companies, not asset operators. Part of the challenge has been talent. These sectors were built around deep technical specialists, engineers, geologists, operators, not the hybrid professionals service science calls for, people who can move between strategy and execution, technical depth and human insight. That is starting to shift. As AI adoption forces executives to confront governance and capability rather than just technology procurement, the profile service science has always needed is becoming the one these industries actually require.

Position Statement

My path to ISSIP started at IBM, watching Smarter Cities apply service science to problems that had always been treated as purely technical or purely civic, never both. That experience shaped how I think about transformation: the hardest problems sit at the intersection of systems and people, not inside either one alone. I’ve spent my career since then bringing that lens to industries that rarely get invited into service innovation conversations, mining, energy, and other capital-intensive sectors where the language of platforms and servitisation still feels foreign. As VP, my priority would be expanding the Resources Sector Vertical Working Group, bringing more heavy industry voices into ISSIP and showing that the capability gaps these companies face in adopting AI and platform thinking are governance problems as much as technology ones. ISSIP’s relevance to the next wave of industrial transformation depends on hearing from people working inside these industries, not just observing them from outside. I’d welcome the chance to help build that bridge.

Driton Sahiti

Short Bio

I am an ISSIP Ambassador, senior lecturer, entrepreneur, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work connects service science theory with entrepreneurial practice and real-world value creation. My areas of specialization include strategic value creation, innovation commercialization, service research, and service science, integrating conceptual research with new venture development, European projects, living innovation ecosystems, and international academic collaboration. I completed a PhD at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, with the thesis Understanding the Value Phenomenon: Towards a Typology of Value Creation Practices, which established the conceptual foundation for my Strategic Value Creation research programme. This programme has evolved into an integrated agenda spanning Strategic Value Innovation (SVI), Strategic Value Innovation Service (SVIS), Strategic Value Innovation Service Systems (SVISS), Strategic Value Innovation Service Systems Science (SVISSS), artificial intelligence, innovation commercialization, and digital service ecosystems. These frameworks are intended not only to advance academic understanding, but also to help entrepreneurs, organizations, and communities design, test, and develop new service concepts and value-creating systems.
I currently teach Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Brand Strategy, Digital Marketing, and Content Marketing at the Canadian Institute of Technology in Albania. My earlier industry leadership and entrepreneurial experience spans telecommunications, management consulting, hospitality innovation, event and talent management, and international project development. My focus today is building stronger bridges among academic research, entrepreneurship, industry collaboration, European projects, and living innovation ecosystems—particularly in the Western Balkans and other emerging economies.

Position Statement

My primary goal would be to broaden global participation in ISSIP—especially from emerging and underrepresented regions—by creating collaborative service innovation case studies and practice-based initiatives that demonstrate the value of ISSIP’s global community. I believe service science is most powerful when rigorous theory, entrepreneurial action, and real-world experimentation inform one another. Through collaborations involving students, faculty advisors, entrepreneurs, industry mentors, and public-sector partners, participants could analyze complex problems, integrate multidisciplinary perspectives, and use frameworks such as SVIS and SVISS to design and test new service concepts and value-creating systems.