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Abstract
Services are intangible, simultaneous, local, heterogeneous, and hard to store by nature, and therefore are very difficult to standardize and duplicate. But once they are standardized, they can be duplicated. For service industry one can use know-how to establish product-duplication thresholds and economy of scale to create market entry barriers. The benefits of economy of scale can then be best demonstrated by business model innovation. The key to developing Taiwan’s service industry lies in upgrading service products quality and expanding export markets, the former requiring supplementation of knowledge content, and the latter requiring enhancement of their duplicability.
Taiwan’s government has just approved a new service industry development plan, aimed at building sound foundations for the development of the service sector as a whole through measures to bolster service industries’ international competitiveness, strengthen R&D and innovation capabilities, create service differentiation, invest in human resources, and improve service industry statistics. Under the service industry development plan, tourism, cultural and creative, medical care, logistics, telecommunications, and technical services industries are identified to be Taiwan’s budding service industries.
Biography
 Dr. Chen is currently serving as Minister of the Cabinet’s Council for Economic Planning and Development, and is concurrently a professor in the Department of Economics, National Taiwan University (NTU). He obtained his bachelor’s degree from NTU’s Department of Electrical Engineering, and his PhD in Economics from Pennsylvania State University in the USA. He has previously served as President of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER), which for many years has played a key role as a government think-tank. During his presidency of CIER, he served as an adviser to the President’s Economic Advisory Panel. His main fields of research concern international trade and industrial economics, and he teaches courses on the principles of economics and on trade theory and policy. Dr Chen has written numerous articles published in leading academic journals at home and abroad, and is the author of a few textbooks on economics and international trade theory. He has a wealth of teaching experience, and is always highly regarded by his students.
Abstract
The world is rapidly becoming a services economy, but what does this mean for innovation? Is there a realistic opportunity for institutions and regions to differentiate themselves using innovation in services, or are many services doomed to become commodities of questionable quality and low technology content? We will attempt to answer these questions by explaining why services is at a crossroads, describing key services trends and best practices, and how Services Science, Management and Engineering may play an essential role in improving world economic health.
Biography
 Dr. Robert JT Morris is Vice President, Services Research, IBM, where he is responsible for IBM's worldwide research efforts in services. From 2004-2006 he was VP, Assets Innovation, IBM Global Services where he put in place the strategies and practices to transform IBM’s services business to one that is based on technology or IP assets.
From 1999-2004, he was the director of the IBM Almaden Research Center where he oversaw scientists and engineers doing exploratory and applied research in computer, physical and behavioral sciences. During this period Robert was also vice president for Personal Systems and Storage research in IBM. During this period the theme of "services science" was initiated by IBM Research and developed working closely with university, industry and government partners. Earlier, Robert was a director at the IBM T.J. Watson Research lab in New York, where he led teams in systems research. Originally from Australia, he began his career at Bell Laboratories where he was involved in developing a number of networking and computing technologies.
Robert was chairman of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC) from 2002-2005, an organization consisting of the heads of major research institutions in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. He represented IBM on the Government University Industry Research Roundtable (run by the National Academies) from 2001-2006. He has published more than fifty articles in computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics literature and has received eleven patents. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, a Fellow of the IEEE, and is on a variety of advisory boards for leading universities and research institutes.
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