In the forthcoming decade, smart products and services will transform both markets and companies. This development brings about various managerial challenges. The Conference on "Challenges in Managing Smart Products and Services (CHIMSPAS)" aims at providing an interdisciplinary research platform for scrutinizing respective managerial issues. To this end, we welcome colleagues from diverse management fields such as innovation and technology management, service management, marketing, human resources, entrepreneurship, as well as colleagues from engineering and practitioners.

The conference will take place in Bielefeld, a lovely town in the center of East Westphalia, which is the home of numerous highly successful SME with several of them being 'hidden champions' in their industries. Bielefeld University in particular hosts the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) as well as the Institute of Technological Innovation, Market Development and Entrepreneurship (iTIME), which are concerned with engineering and economic issues of smart products and services.

We invite conceptual, empirical, and analytical works that might be presented either as regular talks or during a central poster session.
Potential contributions should be submitted as extended abstracts. Both completed research and work in progress will be considered. An award for the most influential conference contribution will be presented during the conference. Moreover, we are planning a special issue in an established academic journal after the conference. A corresponding call for papers will be made available in early 2019 (see conference website at www.chimspas-2019.de).

Topics of interest

Conference contributions need to be related to challenges in managing smart products and services, including (but not limited to) the topics below:
(*) Big data handling and usage
(*) Branding of smart products and services
(*) Business models for smart products and services
(*) Customer co-creation in "smart" innovation processes
(*) Data security and privacy
(*) Drivers and barriers to the adoption or diffusion of smart products and services
(*) Implications of smart products and services on R&D, supply chain management, and controlling
(*) HR perspectives on employees' usage and adoption of smart products and services
(*) Marketing requirements for the management of smart products and services
(*) Smart service systems

Abstract Submission

Authors should send their abstracts (as a pdf file with a maximum of 500 words) to the conference e-mail address chimspas@uni-bielefeld.de by April 1, 2019. There will be no publicly available conference proceedings and, thus, abstract submission to the conference do not impede submission of the full paper to a journal afterwards.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 1, 2019
Authors notification: End of April 2019
Early bird register closing date: May 31, 2019 Final registration date for all presenting authors: June 30, 2019
Conference: August 22–23, 2019

Conference Organizers

Nicola Bilstein, JProf., Management of Smart Products, Bielefeld University
Christian Stummer, Prof., Innovation and Technology Management, Bielefeld University

Venue

The conference takes place in the CITEC Building at Bielefeld University (https://www.cit-ec.de/en/citec-building).

Conference Website

Further information and updates can be obtained from the conference website at www.chimspas-2019.de.

Call for Abstracts