Call for papers: Intellectual Capital Management for Service Productivity Improvement

Call for papers: Intellectual Capital Management for Service Productivity Improvement

A special issue of International Journal of Services Technology and Management

Similarly to manufacturing organisations, service organisations are challenged to continuous productivity improvement. Both in the case of globally-operating and competing companies as well as in locally-operating public welfare organisations, there is a need to make sure that service production is effective and efficient and that resources are optimised, properly allocated and exploited. This means that a key target for service organisations is the improvement of service operations productivity. This poses different issues, such as in particular:
How to link the management of knowledge resources to the improvement of the services quality and to the outcomes of service delivery?
How to measure service productivity when the output is intangible and cannot be counted similarly to goods (physical products)?

Indeed, by definition, service is something intangible and its production is fundamentally based on knowledge processes and resources. Managing service production may require different approaches, models and tools than those designed for manufacturing organisations. In order to explore how service operations productivity can be improved, a particularly useful approach appears to be intellectual capital management.

Intellectual capital has been an active research theme during the past decade. Significant research efforts have been used to develop frameworks and tools for understanding, analysing, measuring and managing the intangible and knowledge assets of organisations. This research field highlights some of the phenomena posing challenges to managing service productivity and services in general.

There are many different services and service organisations, and probably as many different ways to improve productivity. This Special Issue aims to investigate the contribution of the intellectual capital research stream to service productivity improvement.

Academics and researchers interested in this research theme are encouraged to submit a paper for evaluation. In addition, selected papers from IFKAD 2008 conference will also be included.

We invite to submit papers related to the theme including but not limited to the issues listed below:

• Intellectual capital (IC) and productivity: how are the concepts linked theoretically and empirically?
• IC in service companies: what is the role of IC in a service organisation?
• IC management: how different service companies manage IC in practice?
• Innovations in services: how to leverage IC to create productive services?
• Service productivity measurement: how to capture the intangible outputs?
• Value creation process in services: how is customer value created and how can it be measured?
• Knowledge-intensive services (KIS): how to manage companies for which knowledge is their key input and output?

Important Dates
Deadline for Submission of Papers: 15 September 2008
Review Deadline: 15 November 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 30 November 2008
Deadline for Revised Papers: 31 January 2009