On the 1st June 2017, the Centre for Service Management hosted an international research symposium on Transformative Service Research with contributions from researchers from both the US and UK. 

Transformative Service Research (TSR) is defined as service research that strives to create uplifting changes and improvements in the wellbeing of individuals (consumers and employees), families, social networks, communities, cities, nations, collectives and ecosystems (Anderson, Ostrom, and Bitner 2010).

This research broadens the traditional scope of service research to include themes as access, mitigating vulnerability and extending service delivery to contexts of institutional frailty such as developing countries and below-poverty-line communities in the industrialised world.

The event brought together academics and practitioners on this important topic, and we thank all participants for creating such a lively and thought-provoking event. Through the discovery of important synergies among participants, we believe that the future research agenda on TSR looks very promising indeed!

We would like to thank Professor Ray Fisk and Dr Linda Nasr (Texas State University) specifically for bringing the Transformative Service Collaborative to CSM. We hope that a future CSM-TSC collaboration can make great strides in developing the TSR agenda.