Workshop on “SERVICE BUSINESS INNOVATION: IMPLICATIONS ON GOVERNANCE, MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING AND CONTROL” 29-30 June 2017

The Institute of Management organizes, with the support of EIASM (European Institute of Advances Studies in Management), a workshop on “SERVICE BUSINESS INNOVATION: IMPLICATIONS ON GOVERNANCE, MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING AND CONTROL” on 29-30 June 2017.

New service businesses emerge in all the industries. Especially, manufacturing companies are increasingly interested and currently investing in their service activities, that is after sales and business support for their customers. A substantial part of the revenues of the manufacturers currently stem outside the physical product sales. New forms of governance, new business models and new management accounting practices are required from the manufacturers. The division of tasks between the manufacturers, the customers and third party service providers are currently challenged in many respects. Managing the new governance of networks (manufacturers, customers and other service providers) requires rethinking of management accounting in supporting the service business even beyond the organizational boundaries. However, the majority of the companies are struggling in identifying and introducing the required governance and management accounting to support their service business innovation. New tools and concepts are crucial for releasing the service business potential and to manage the performance and profitability of the parties involved.

In order to support the service business innovation of the manufacturers (servitisation, servitization, service infusion, product-service systems), there are several critical aspects to be taken into consideration. First, new governance is supposed to be flexible enough to deal with different levels of service innovation across the customer industries in different regions. This requires new management accounting practices (for instance financial indicators) for the manufacturers. Second, regarding the financial aspects of the new service operations, the value is increasingly generated during the life-cycle of the products, based on the collected information about those products, and their relations/connections to their use contexts. Third, the management accounting needs to be re-thought to make it fit the new governance, to manage the product fleets (products in use at the customers), to increase customer value (requirements of the customers under new circumstances) and to enhance service operations (featuring new capabilities). Despite their practical relevance, these aspects and many other related topics have not been sufficiently addressed in the literature.

More info on the Workshop here.

Teemu Laine (Tampere University of Technology), Andrea Tenucci (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) and Petri Suomala (Tampere University of Technology) as Guest Editors, will select a number of papers for a Special Issue on Journal of Management and Governance.