Interview with Speaker Jürg Meierhofer

Jürg Meierhofer is senior lecturer, researcher and project manager in smart service engineering at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). He is the coordinator of the “ZHAW Platform Industry 4.0“and expert group leader for the Expert Group “Smart Services” in the data innovation alliance.

Could you tell us a little bit about your professional background?

The design and engineering of services is the common thread throughout my professional activities. I got my PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) as well as an executive MBA degree from the international institute of management in technology (iimt). For more than ten years I worked as a manager for service innovation and optimization in the telecommunications and insurance industry.

What will you be speaking about at the SDS2021?

Service customization is a key factor for value creation in socio-technical service ecosystems, enabled and fuelled by new data-driven approaches. I will address the question of how to design service customization within the provider-customer interaction and show a novel quantitative approach to model this. We will see that the optimum design of the customer journey is hard to find by heuristic approaches and that the latter are often sub-optimal.

Why is the SDS conference important?

The SDS is important because it brings together the leading actors in data driven innovation from all around the world as well as from the Swiss community. It allows for visibility of the various innovation streams and provides the chance to connect to create new potential.