Harvard Business Review lists COBE faculty member’s book among popular case studies

Radford University Marketing Associate Professor Gary Schirr’s most recent book, “Service Innovation,” has been selected to accompany Harvard Business Publishers’ most popular case studies.

Harvard Business Review Case Discussions are short studies on management challenges, based on actual cases taught in business schools, such as Radford University College of Business and Economics (COBE).

The cases allow students to apply conceptual material to real-world business situations. Each is about three pages, plus optional commentary from experts.

In “Service Innovation,” Schirr and his co-authors discuss new service innovations, ways the service industry is growing, what drives innovation in the services and how organizations can work with service innovations in a structured way.

“Even though 83 percent of the U.S. economy is service, there has been very little published on service innovation,” Schirr said.

The authors view service as the value-creating activity that customers perform in their own context. The role of a company, they write, is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation.

Based on this view, the authors present a model of service innovation and guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective, how an organization should view its customers in order to be successful, what a service development process looks like and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service or solution provider.

Schirr wrote “Service Innovation” with Anders Gustafsson, Per Kristensson and Lars Witell, who are part of the esteemed Center for Service at Karlstad University in Sweden.

The book is published by Business Expert Press.

Schirr, a former CEO of an Asian subsidiary of a major Wall Street firm, joined the COBE faculty in 2007. He was named to Brand Quarterly’s 2016 list of 50 Marketing Thought Leaders over 50, and has been recognized by Social Media Marketing Magazine as one “who gets it.” Schirr was rated No. 3 on the magazine’s list of 92 top marketing professors on Twitter.

Schirr has considerable experience in service innovation. He worked on the new-product committees of two major financial exchanges and was also the former vice president of new product development for a high-tech trading venture. In addition, Schirr has operated a consulting firm where he worked with startup firms. His Amazon Author page is www.amazon.com/author/garyschirr.