Productivity and innovation in services still depend heavily on intuition and the experience of employees. In Japan, esteem for services is still low and corporations are slow to standardize and commercialize their service operations. The current development of service science, which integrates informationtechnology-based modeling with management and behavioral sciences, now offers the opportunity to analyze existing deficiencies and promote innovation more systematically. In comparison with the United States, service science in Japan places a stronger focus on cognitive and behavioral aspects while sharing the core of information systems development. This seems to fit well with the need of Japan's major corporations to reform and modularize their highly integrated operations and to standardize their service applications.
