Heiko Holz (STM) at the 9th IRSSM at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
This past week, Heiko Holz, Research Associate and PhD candidate at the TIME Research Area Department for Service and Technology Marketing headed by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Paluch attended the 9th International Research Symposium for Service Management in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
This year’s conference and PhD symposium focused on research questions facing the keynote of “Service Imperatives in the New Economy: Towards convergence of functional and experiential services.” The first day of the four-day-conference was dedicated to a number of seminars and workshops in which well-known researchers from the field of service research shared their experience in academia as well as advice and insights on scientific practice with PhD-level participants. Together with senior researchers like Prof. Chriss Voss (Warwick University, UK), Prof. Joan Ball (St.John’s University, NY, USA) or Prof. Jay Kandampully (Ohio State, USA), the young scholar dealt with questions and methods facing research organization, initiation of cooperations and partnerships or the scientific wrtiting process. Lectures and exercises on methodology and the scientific process were successfully combined with interactive discussions on individual questions of the participants. The following three days were characterized by panel discussion on scientifically relevant questions and individual presentations to be held by all attendees of the conference. The attendees were able to present their own research, successfully completed or still work in prgress, receive feedback and set the start for potential cross-border collaborations with interested colleagues. In this context Heiko was able to give a presentation on his current research project in progress dealing with “The value of application-based service experience: Extending the scope of customer experience research.” With his interest in customer experience research he was at the heart of this year’s conference’s orientation towards the convergence of functional and experiential services. In addition to a focus on presentations and discussions, some time was of course dedicated to foster personal bonding and interdisciplinary dialogue among the scholars coming from different areas of service research.