The authors of the article propose an abstraction that they consider very important to the service revolution of the 21st century: the service system, which is a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Many systems can be viewed as service systems, including families, cities, and companies, among many others. In this paper, they show how the service-system abstraction can be used to understand how value is created, in the process unifying concepts from many disciplines and creating the foundation for an integrated science of service.

Developing a shared vocabulary that can be used across disciplines to describe the great variety of service systems is crucial. In this article, given the service system abstraction and the service dominant logic on which it depends, the authers define service science and its variations:

• Service science is the study of the application of the resources of one or more systems for the benefit of another system in economic exchange.
• Normative service science is the study of how one system can and should apply its resources for the mutual benefit of another system and of the system itself.
• Service science, management, and engineering (SSME) is the application of normative service science.