Abstract :
As nations grow and develop more as knowledge-based economies, services industries become a higher and higher fraction of the GDP. In the USA and some European economies, services comprise 75% of the GDP. While those figures do not yet represent most Asian economies, some of the fastest growing businesses in China, India and elsewhere in Asia are services businesses. In this presentation we focus on how a broadly-based engineering analysis of services, buttressed by principals of social sciences and management science, can lead to vastly improved designs and operations of services industries. We provide as illustrations various services in health care, technology-enabled education (including e-learning) and catastrophe response (including natural disasters such as hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes and influenza pandemics).
