The service sector is a dominant contributor to GDP of most developed and developing nations. A large segment of the population is involved in this sector for their livelihood. It is a requisite that focused academic attention is directed at it. This is an imperative if the sector has to grow in a planned manner in the future. The on-line economy or new age businesses, most of which are service companies, had started with great fanfare but the life cycle of the 'dotcom' companies, hordes of which have gone bust, have proven at least one thing amongst others – that, the business modelling of these companies were not thought out in their entirety and that the assumptions and benchmarks that were used in strategy formulation were faulty at best.
 

This is obviously going to be there when a sunrise sector opens up but the kind of chaos that it has led-to the world over, especially in the stock markets, indicates that the thinkers, researchers and analysts were not able to see through the consequences and were not able to provide guidelines and propose relevant business models. This is avoidable (if at all partially) only when there is a corpus of research and analytical work to base decisions upon or to at least lend some objectivity to decision making.

The Journal of Services Research is an effort in this direction to help build and document such a corpus by promoting researchers from India and abroad to focus on issues related to services management and provide well researched and tested benchmarks for industry, and also to provide new directions for further research.

IIMT as an institution focuses on the emerging sectors of service businesses and we feel that it is relevant for us to take an initiative in harnessing academic and industry effort in order to further the boundaries of knowledge in our chosen area of Endeavour. We look forward to inputs from relevant quarters-suggesting, criticising and contributing to the increased awareness and understanding of this sector.