Ray Fisk https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-fisk-01a9695/ ISSIP Award https://issip.org/issip-2022-excellence-in-service-innovation-award-program-awardees/ Award Type: Distinguished Recognition Innovation: ServCollab – Serving Humanity Through Collaboration Summary: ServCollab is building research capacity to tackle the large service system problems of the world – a huge task, requiring inclusive and transdisciplinary collaborations. Organization: ServCollab Primary Contact: Ray Fisk (LI) (B) Rodoula Tsiotsou (LI) (B), Karim Sidaoui (LI) (B), Sertan Kabadayi (LI) (B), Linh Hoang Vu (LI) (B), Amir Raki (LI) (B), Kristina Heinonen (LI) (B), Werner Kunz (LI) (B), Rebekah Russell-Bennett (LI) (B), K.Daisy Li (LI) (B)

1. ServCollab's Approach to
“Serving Humanity
Through Collaboration”
Ray Fisk
Founder and President, ServCollab
Professor of Marketing, Texas State University

2. Topics
1. What Is ServCollab?
2. ServCollab’s Publications
3. Building Research Capacity

3. Serving Humanity Through Collaboration
1. What Is ServCollab?

4. What Is ServCollab?
•Our name is a contraction of “Serving
Humanity Through Collaboration.”
•ServCollab is a service research
collaborative for diagnosing and treating
humanity’s service system problems.
•Based on Transformative Service Research!
https://www.servcollab.org/

5. Serving Humanity Through Collaboration
ServCollab's Mission
To serve humanity through service research
collaborations that catalyze reducing human
suffering and improving human wellbeing.

6. The Human Ignorance Problem
• Ignorance is the natural condition of every human child.
• We should respect human ignorance!
• As a species, ignorance is our superpower and our most
dangerous attribute.
• This also means that humans are better at fantasy than reality.
• Human intelligence and human capabilities are very pliable.
• Overcoming our ignorance requires effort and neural plasticity:
- Information is easy to share.
- Knowledge is difficult to share.
- Wisdom is the most difficult to share.

7. Evolution of Human Service Systems
• As a social species, our service systems evolved to help us solve our
ignorance problems.
• Anthropologists (Tomasello et al., 2012) have characterized the
evolution of our species in prehistoric times as mutualistic
collaboration driven by interdependence.
• The first service systems were families and social evolution continued
with the steady evolution from families, to tribes, to villages, to cities
and to nations (Fisk, 2009;Fisk and Grove, 2010).
• Through a process of “complementary cognition” (Taylor et al. 2021),
we evolved the ability to work together to share cognitive capacity.

8. The Challenge of Serving Humanity
• Science about humans is difficult and remarkably fragmentary.
• It is hard for us humans to hold a mirror up to our mind or body.
• Fantasy and wishful thinking are difficult to overcome.
• ServCollab seeks to enable a transformative synthesis of human
knowledge that establishes a resilient foundation for serving
humanity through collaboration.
• This will require testing service ideas and converting them into
service actions.

9. Serving Humanity Through Collaboration
2. ServCollab’s Publications

10. Three ServCollab Publications

11. “Elevating the Human Experience (HX)
Through Service Research Collaborations:
Introducing ServCollab”
Fisk, Raymond P., Linda Alkire, Laurel Anderson, David E. Bowen,
Thorsten Gruber, Amy L. Ostrom and Lia Patrício
Journal of Service Management, 2020
a. ServCollab’s Perspective on Elevating
Human Experience

12. Service Occurs
in Interactions
Social
Interactions
Monetary
Interactions

13. Conflict
Competition
Cooperation
Collaboration
Hierarchy of Human Interactions
Respecting & Empowering
Human Agency Significantly
Reduces the Risk of Exploitation

14. b. The First ServCollab Project
“Rethinking Service Systems and Public Policy: A Transformative Refugee
Service Experience Framework”
- Led by Silke Boenigk (University of Hamburg), Sertan Kabadayi (Fordham
University), and Ray Fisk (Texas State University).
- Started at the May 2019 Transformative Consumer Research Conference.
- A global team of 13 service scholars from 7 countries (8 members are migrants)!
Boenigk, Silke, Raymond Fisk, Sertan Kabadayi, Linda Alkire, Lilliemay Cheung,
Canan Corus, Jörg Finsterwalder, Aaron A. Kreimer, Nadina Luca, Mansour
Omeira, Pallab Paul, Marcos F. Santos and Nina Smidt (2021), Journal of Public
Policy & Marketing, 40 (2), 165-183.

15. Why Start with Refugees?
• Refugee numbers are climbing significantly – 100 million (UNHCR).
• Refugees are ”Early Warnings” of humanity’s global problems.
• Refugees are fleeing failing service systems (whether human caused or caused by
natural disasters).
• Refugees are a globally unique service inclusion problem.
• Refugees need cultural inclusion, which is even more complex than social or
economic inclusion.
• Most human problems of mistreatment or profound need intersect with the
plight of refugees.
• Refugees are the archetype of the people ServCollab seeks to help.
There are still no global solutions to the refugee crisis!

16. c. Service Ecosystem Health
– The first ServCollab Perspective publication.
– Lead article in a 2021 special issue of Service Science
on “Reimagining the Science of Service”!

17. Goldilocks Civilization Thought Experiment
•“The Goldilocks Civilization thought experiment
reimagines human service ecosystems to expand their
ability to support individual human life, human
societies, and the biodiversity of planet Earth.”
•“In this thought experiment, the primary challenge is
protecting the natural rights of individuals,
encouraging the vigor of human societies, and
nurturing the planetary health of life on Earth.”

18. Serving Humanity Through Collaboration
3. Building Research
Capacity

19. ServCollab
Believes that
Service
Researchers Are
Uniquely
Positioned to Help
Accelerate Human
Progress, But We
Need Help!

20. Human Experience and Social Roles
• Private Experiences
- Family Roles
• Parents
• Children
• Grandparents
• Extended Family Members
- Friends Roles
• Close Friendships
• Social Friendships
• Public Experiences
- Customer Roles
- Employee Roles
Human
Experience
Mostly
Nonmonetary
Interactions
Mostly Monetary
Interactions

21. Three Nested
Levels of Human
Experience
External
Experience
Social
Experience
Personal
Experience
Micro
Meso
Macro
Each of these levels is a
unique service zone.
The service zones
interact, too.
Social Experience is
the greatest challenge!

22. Inequality in Service Systems
•Inequality is not a flaw in our human nature.
•Inequality is a flaw in the design of our service systems.
•Inequality has a very long history in service systems.
- The systems of patriarchy, aristocracies, emperors, slavery,
feudalism, and colonialism were all designed for inequality.
•We need to design for fairness!

23. We Need a Serving Humans Logic
•Service-Dominant Logic can only explain mutually
beneficial exchange – (Lusch & Vargo 2014, p. 117).
•But the roles of dominance and submission are the
essential context of most service exchanges across
written history.
•Because human exchanges are often unfair, we need
to repair broken human service interactions.

24. ServCollab’s Serving Humanity
Research Approach
1. Define & Describe
OptimalService
System
Characteristics
2. Define & Describe
Service System
Inadequacies
3. Propose & Design
Curative Service
System Treatments
4. Propose & Design
Preventive Service
System Safeguards

25. Shopping for Collaborators

26. Funded Research Projects
• Our first collaboration “Ask” is for help creating funded
research projects that combine donor funds, research
collaborators, research training, access to data, and a
roadmap to meaningful service system improvements.
• ServCollab’s first interest is the needs of refugees, but we are
open to other research projects that might fit our three
research themes of service inclusion, service language, and
climate change.

27. ServCollab’s Efforts to Co-Create the Future
• In ServCollab, we are technology optimists!
• Human progress is often measured by our technological progress.
• Because technology is dependent on its creators and users, it can be
of two main kinds:
- The technology of exploitation
- The technology of service
• “A Goldilocks civilization is possible because of the rapid evolution of
computer technology.”

28. Rising Above Our Perilous Times
• In our perilous times, it can be difficult to be
optimistic.
• While human service systems seem remarkably
fragile, we can work together to overcome and
rise about these service system problems.
• Many humans and many human organizations
share a collective yearning to find solutions to
these service system problems.
• ServCollab intends to help accelerate progress
on reducing human suffering and improving
human wellbeing!

29. Digital Communication
•How to Communicate with ServCollab:
- ServCollab on Facebook -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/servcollab
- ServCollab on Twitter – @servcollab
- ServCollab on LinkedIn –
https://www.linkedin.com/company/servcollab
- ServCollab on YouTube -
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx51pPij9I29NvF2RlW9tzQ
•How to Join ServCollab?
- Sign in at our Website https://www.servcollab.org/

30. ServCollab Articles – Full Citations
1. Fisk, Raymond P., Linda Alkire, Laurel Anderson, David E. Bowen, Thorsten Gruber, Amy
L. Ostrom and Lia Patrício (2020), "Elevating the Human Experience (HX) through
Service Research Collaborations: Introducing Servcollab," Journal of Service
Management, 31 (4), 615-635.
2. Boenigk, Silke, Raymond Fisk, Sertan Kabadayi, Linda Alkire, Lilliemay Cheung, Canan
Corus, Jörg Finsterwalder, Aaron A. Kreimer, Nadina Luca, Mansour Omeira, Pallab Paul,
Marcos F. Santos and Nina Smidt (2021), "Rethinking Service Systems and Public Policy:
A Transformative Refugee Service Experience Framework," Journal of Public Policy &
Marketing, 40 (2), 165-183.
3. Fisk, Raymond P. and Linda Alkire (2021), "Service Ecosystem Health: A Transformative
Approach to Elevating Service Science," Service Science, 13 (4), 194-204.

31. Thank You!
https://www.servcollab.org/
Serving Humanity Through Collaboration

32. Questions
ray.fisk@servcollab.org