The major purpose of this four-year program is to help improve the competitiveness of New Zealand service firms by assessing key sources of advantage, benchmarking related management practices, and devising seminars and training materials to up skill end users (the owners and managers of service firms).The first stage, 1998–1999, involved a multi-industry survey which highlighted major sources of competitive advantage. The second stage, in 1999–2000, involved identifying the top performers, as well as a smaller group of lower performers, and conducting in-depth interviews with CEOs (or owners of smaller firms), and marketing and personnel managers to benchmark key practices in market orientation, branding, new service development, IT and skills development. The interviews identified strong brands and motivated and skilled staff as the two most important sources of competitive advantage. The third stage, in 2000–2001, involved technology transfer. This included the development of a web site, hosting a services marketing conference for both academic researchers and business managers in Dunedin in February 2001, presenting research results in a ‘road show’ of seminars to more than 1,000 managers in 24 main centres, and producing associated training materials. The latter was achieved by developing an interactive Cd-Rom based diagnostic tool to assess firms’ ‘competitive health’. The CD-Rom program helps managers improve their own business knowledge and organisational performance by offering suggestions for improving areas of weakness, examples of best practices in services marketing and management, internal links to appropriate sections of previous research reports, and external links to appropriate research and business web sites. The prototype has been developed, and the final version will be completed and distributed free to the 1,000 seminar participants, 400 survey participants and 45 interview participants in September 2001.