Janet R. McColl-Kennedy

Janet R. McColl-Kennedy is Professor of Marketing, and Lead, Innovation Pathways Program, FaBA (Australia's Food and Beverage Accelerator), Trailblazer Universities program, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. https://faba.au/

Professor McColl-Kennedy is an Honorary Visiting Professor and Fellow, Cambridge Service Alliance, Institute for Manufacturing, in the Department of Engineering, the University of Cambridge, UK. She is also the Founding Co-Lead of the Service Innovation Alliance (SIA) Research Hub at the Business School, The University of Queensland. SIA is a multidisciplinary research hub focusing on Customer Experience, Service Innovation and Sustainability, with an emphasis on AI, digital transformation and service design.

Janet embodies scholarly excellence. She is an elected Fellow of the prestigious Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) for her distinguished contribution to the social sciences. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC) having "demonstrated outstanding contributions to the Academy and also demonstrated eminence in the Marketing discipline through research, scholarship, education and leadership". https://anzmac.org/fellows/. In 2023 she received the inaugural Bo Edvardsson Industry Impact in Services award.

Professor McColl-Kennedy was recognised in the "Highly Cited Researcher Awards for 2021", released by Clarivate™. This prestigious achievement is for those who are pioneers in their field, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for the field and year in the Web of Science™. In 2023 and 2024 she was ranked in the World's Best Business and Management Scientists by Research.com. https://research.com/scientists-rankings/business-and-management/au

Professor Janet McColl-Kennedy has made a significant research contribution to the discipline of Marketing, specifically in her research area of “Services”. With over 200 publications (89 being refereed international journal articles, 21 book chapters/books, 6 industry articles, white papers, and reports, 14 workbooks and 71 refereed international conference proceedings), Professor McColl-Kennedy is not only a leading senior marketing academic in Australia, she is internationally recognised as a leading researcher in Service Science. Her research interests focus on customer experience management and measurement, and the role of digital technology, customer insights and choice preferences, customer complaining behaviour and customer value co-creation. She has particular expertise in health care services. Professor McColl-Kennedy is dedicated to nurturing the next generation of researchers mentoring over 20 PhD and honours students.

Janet leads several cross disciplinary and international research teams, obtaining over $96.8 million in competitive research grants, including 20 years of continuous funding from the prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC).

Zsofia Toth

Zsofia Toth is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Management at Durham University, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the development of business relationships and networks, B2B services, the digital aspects of service innovation.

She has published in and is a member of the editorial and review board of Industrial Marketing Management, and recently joined the JOSM Advisory Board. She received distinguished reviewer award from Journal of Business Research in 2016.

She also published in International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Business Ethics.

Lars Witell

Professor Lars Witell holds a Chair in Business Administration and is Head of the Marketing Unit at Linköping University, Sweden.

Lars has an interest in research on service innovation, servitization, sustainability and customer experience. He is particularly interested in dishonesty and lying behavior and what make individuals change their behavior. He has long experience on doing research together with industry partners from manufacturing, healthcare, and retailing. At the moment he runs research projects on service robots, AI and remanufacturing.

His work has been published in multiple outlets including Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Retailing, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Management and Journal of Services Marketing.

Ruusa Ligthart

Ruusa is a postdoctoral researcher /IfM visitor at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Service Alliance, and CTM. Her post doc studies focus on innovation management in the public sector organisations. Her postdoctoral studies are under the supervision of prof Mohamed Zaki and prof Tim Minshall.

Ruusa Ligthart also works as a senior lecturer in Finland Laurea University of Applied Science. She has extensive experience in teaching, supervising thesis as well as developing and executing RDI projects. Prior to her PhD studies she worked at the RDI unit at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences as both an education service product manager and a project manager. She was working with RDI projects together with various firms, 3rd sector, universities and other research organisations.

Ruusa holds a Master of Science degree with distinction from the University of Brighton, England from the international tourism management. She has worked in the field of hospitality and tourism management and in advisory positions in several countries.

Nima Heirati

Dr Nima Heirati is Associate Professor in Marketing at Surrey Business School, University of Surrey.

His research relates predominantly to the field of innovation strategy, servitization, business relationships, customer experience, and the impact of artificial intelligence on consumer experience and wellbeing. His research vision is to make managers and policymakers aware of the bright and dark sides of business practices (e.g., interorganizational trust) and technologies (e.g., AI, service robots), and to explore mechanisms that mitigate the potentially dark implications of such practices and technologies on their businesses, consumers, and society.

His work has been published in leading marketing and service research journals, and he has received several awards and nominations. Before joining academia, Dr Heirati held positions as the marketing manager and business development manager at several manufacturing companies.

Stephan Henneberg

Professor Stephan Henneberg is a Research Partner at the Cambridge Service Alliance, as well as Chair Professor of Marketing and Strategy, Head of the Marketing Department, and Director of the Business Ecosystems Research Group (BERG) at Queen Mary University of London.

As part of the Cambridge Service Alliance, Stephan leads the stream on Digital Transformation.  Before joining Queen Mary, he held academic appointments at Manchester Business School (MBS), University of Manchester, and at the School of Management, University of Bath. He has degrees in Management Studies, Philosophy, Political Sciences, and Economics, and obtained his PhD in Marketing from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Before coming back to academia, he worked in senior positions as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney and McKinsey & Co.

Stephan's research interests are in the area of business marketing and supply chain management, as well as business strategy, e.g. covering topics such as business relationships and networks, supply chain integration, business model innovation through digitalisation (industry 4.0), and service infusion.

Tor W Andreassen

Dr. Tor Wallin Andreassen transitioned to the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in 2013 after holding key roles at BI Norwegian Business School. At NHH, he serves as a Professor of Innovation and previously led The Center for Service Innovation (CSI) and founded the research center Digital Innovations for Sustainable Growth (DIG) at NHH.

His educational background includes a Sivilokonom degree from NHH, an MSc in marketing with honors from BI Norwegian Business School, and a Doctor of Economics from Stockholm University, School of Business.

Jamie Burton

Jamie Burton is a Professor in Marketing at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK. Jamie’s research interests include servitization, customer experiences, feedback, engagement, and relationship management. Jamie’s current research includes exploring customer experiences and outcomes, and the processes and challenges faced by manufacturers and service providers as they strive to deliver new, digital technology supported, services. Jamie has supervised 16 doctoral students to completion and currently supervises two working in customer experiences and circularity/sustainability. He teaches Services and B2B Marketing.

Previously Jamie has been Director of two Manchester MSc Programmes, Head of the Marketing Group, Associate Head of Division for Teaching and most recently, Head of the Management Sciences and Marketing Division at Alliance Manchester Business School.

Prior to studying his PhD, Jamie worked in retail and hospitality management and subsequently he has focused on developing research impact. He managed research for an Alliance MBS practitioner engagement group for over 15 years with a wide range of industry partners. He has chaired customer management academic-practitioner workshops (generating Special Issues in the Journal of Business Research and Journal of Services Marketing) and the Spring Servitization Conference at Manchester. He has also won and manages Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

Jamie has published a range of academic and practitioner outputs in service and operations management journals including: Journal of Service Management, Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management and Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.

Ghasem Zaefarian

Dr. Ghasem Zaefarian is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, UK. He is also deputy head of the graduate school at LUBS. He received his BSc and MBA from Sharif University of Technology, and his PhD from Manchester Business School. He earned his PhD in marketing on the interplay between business relationships and business strategy. His research interests focus on business marketing, international marketing, and services fields of research. Within the broad topic of business marketing, his primary focus has been on buyer-supplier relationships and networks. The second theme of his research is global marketing, focusing predominantly on the different aspects of multinational companies. Within this subject topic, a particular strand of his research focuses on cross-border customer engagement. Another strand of his research within this theme focuses on innovation and knowledge management from the social capital perspective. The third theme of his research focuses on services marketing in a business-to-business context. The fourth and emerging theme of his research focuses on organizational psychology. Currently, Dr Zaefarian is working on the psychology of partnership exchange focusing on drivers of opportunism in interfirm and intrafirm partnership. His research has been published in many journals of international repute including Journal of Journal of International Business Studies, world business, Long Range Planning, International Journal of Operations and Product Management, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Business Research. His works are also regularly presented at leading academic conferences across the world.

Dr. Zaefarian has been serving as an associate editor of the Industrial Marketing Management journal since 2014 and is on the review panel of several leading Journals as an ad hoc reviewer. His classroom teaching and doctoral supervision work spans several areas of services and B2B marketing.

Dahlia El-Manstrly

Dahlia El-Manstrly is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Marketing and the Director of Research for the MCCI group at the University of Sheffield Management School, UK. Prior to this, she served as Co-Director of the Center for Service Excellence and was a lecturer in Marketing at the University of Edinburgh.

Her research specializes in services marketing, with publications in top-tier and international journals such as the Journal of Retailing, Journal of Service Research, Tourism Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management, and International Marketing Review. Dahlia is also on the editorial boards of leading marketing and services journals, including the International Marketing Review, Journal of Services Marketing, and Journal of Service Theory and Practice. She has been recognized with the "Highly Recommended Paper" Award at the AMA SERVSIG conference in 2014 and has received three Teaching Excellence Awards at the University of Edinburgh for best feedback, overall course satisfaction, and inspirational teaching.