The services sector is all around us in industries like government, healthcare, education, hospitality, social media, and business services. All of these industries are facing needs to transform or are currently embracing and creating new elements. Think of AirBnB, Pokémon Go, IBM’s dr Watson, and all kinds of quantified-self applications. Nowadays, the service industry is the largest sector in Western economies and contributes 74% to GDP. Because of its relevance, and the difficultly to manage the intangible and often complex services, services management deserves explicit attention in a master of Strategic Marketing. Traditionally, services research focused on a provider (e.g. doctor) and customer (e.g. patient). Nowadays, we realize that services are typically experienced in a complex service system consisting of configurations of people, technology and organizations. Services are also more and more developed in co-creation with different stakeholders to comply with their needs and wants.
This course provides students with state-of-the art knowledge on advanced service management topics and emphasizes the development of skills that are needed in a service environment by means of offering various didactic approaches as well as a real-life project in the services industry.
In this course, the student will:
1. Gain an appreciation for the challenges inherent in and managing services
2. Learn strategies, tools, and approaches for addressing the challenges of services management
3. Develop advanced knowledge on state-of-the-art services literature
4. Understand the complexities of service design, delivery, and communication
5. Further develop professional and analytical skills by a real-life project in the service industry and by challenging in-class assignments

In contrast to many BSc courses on services marketing that use a services textbook with the principles of services marketing, this advanced MSc course is offered at a completely different level, addressing the most recent strategic and operational issues in service management. The course will familiarize students with cutting edge service management themes such as complex service systems, transformative services, service design, managing service relationships and many more. The list of articles will include the most recent and award winning scientific publications.
This course is also unique in terms of its set-up. Students will meet approximately 10 times in class, where they will participate in sessions that are completely different in their set-up. As an illustration, in one session they will have to present without using any technical devices, in another session they will conduct a role play and in yet another session they will be exposed to a time-pressure assignment.
Next to this variety, students will work in teams on a real-life challenge in the services industry. A services organization will invite students to develop a service management strategy for a particular challenge and will also be involved in evaluating students’ report and presentation at the end of the course.

State of the art scientific articles

This course is in transition for the master Business Research.
See the Master Education and Examination Regulations for more information.

The following rule applies to master Business Research students who started the programme prior to academic year 2024-2025.
TRANSITIONAL REGULATION (EBC4076):
The master Business Research has been discontinued.
Courses of the Business Research master’s programme will continue to be offered until and including academic year 2025-2026 with exam opportunities running until and including 2026-2027.


PREREQUISITES:
All students who are admitted to the Master of Science in International Business can follow this course. Exchange students with a Bachelor degree in Business, or with another Bachelor degree, including a minor in Marketing are admitted too.
An advanced level of English.