If the U.S. economy and workers' wages are to grow robustly over the next several decades, the key will be to find better ways to enable innovation and achieve higher productivity gains in services sector, which accounts for 80 percent of the economy. Yet, even though services are central to our future, neither our technology and economic policies nor our higher education practices have kept up with the reality of continued growth in services, much of it in information-intensive and health-care related services.
At this ITIF forum, Dr. Bill Hefley, Associate Teaching Professor in the Service Management area at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and Heinz School of Public Policy and Management and editor of the new book Service Science, Management and Engineering: Education for the 21st Century, will make the case that it is time to bring the same scientific rigor to services that has long been appl