COBE professor co-authors "Service Innovation" book

gary-schirr
Gary Schirr

Radford University Marketing Associate Professor Gary Schirr is co-author of a new book exploring the service industry and its contributions to our economy.

In the book, "Service Innovation," Schirr and his co-authors discuss new service innovations, how the service industry is growing, what drives innovation in the services and how organizations can work with service innovations in a structured way.

"Even though 83 percent of the U.S. economy is service, there has been very little published on service innovation," Schirr said.

The authors view service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company, they write, is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation.

Based on this view, the authors present in the book a model of service innovation and develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective, how an organization should view its customers in order to be successful, what a service development process looks like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.

Schirr wrote Service Innovation" with Anders Gustafsson, Per Kristensson and Lars Witell, who are part of the esteemed Center for Service at Karlstad University in Sweden.

The book is published by Business Expert Press.

Schirr, a former CEO of an Asian subsidiary of a major Wall Street firm, joined Radford University's College of Business and Economics faculty in 2007. He was named to Brand Quarterly’s 2014 list of 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50, and has been recognized by Social Media Marketing Magazine as one "who gets it." Schirr was rated No. 3 on the magazine’s list of 92 top marketing professors on Twitter.

Schirr has had considerable experience in service innovation. He served on the new product committees of two major financial exchanges and was also the former vice president of new product development for a high-tech trading venture. In addition, Schirr has operated a consulting firm where he worked with startup firms. His Amazon Author page is www.amazon.com/author/garyschirr.

May 10, 2016
Chad Osborne
540-831-7761
caosborne@radford.edu