HTM Service and Experience Innovations Symposia

John Grable

Athletic Association Endowed Professor, University of Georgia

Date of keynote: Sept. 22, 2023

John Grable teaches and conducts research in the Certified Financial Planner^TM Board of Standards Inc. undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Georgia, where he holds an Athletic Association Endowed Professorship in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Prior to his academic profession, he was a benefits administrator and later an investment advisor in an asset management firm. Grable served as the founding editor for the Journal of Personal Finance, co-founding editor of the Journal of Financial Therapy, and co-founding editor of Financial Planning Review. He currently serves as editor of Financial Services Review. He is best known for his work in the areas of financial risk-tolerance assessment, behavioral financial planning, and evidence-based practice management tools and techniques. He is the recipient of numerous research awards and grants and actively promotes the link between research and practice. He has published over 150 refereed papers and co-authored five financial planning textbooks.

Keynote Abstract: The evolution of process automation is quickly eroding the value proposition offered by many consumer science degrees. Nearly every career path for those graduating from hospitality, tourism, consumer economics, housing and financial services programs will be impacted, if not dramatically altered, through artificial intelligence and machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, and predictive analytics. Advances in AI could make the recruitment, retention and placement of students a growing challenge for colleges that have been built to meet the needs of today’s service jobs rather than tomorrow’s career opportunities. Grable provides an overview of the way service-focused degree programs can begin to realign their pedagogical approaches to take advantage of trends in process automation to ensure that future graduates are equipped to deal with a post-AI employment landscape.

Kevin Kam Fung So

William S. Spears Chair in Business, professor and PhD program coordinator, Oklahoma State University

Date of keynote: Oct. 19, 2023

Kevin Kam Fung So is the William S. Spears Chair in Business, professor and PhD program coordinator with the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business. As the recipient of 25 research awards, So’s expertise lies at the intersection of hospitality and tourism marketing and service management. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in ABDC A and A* journals. He is one of few scholars in his discipline to have been named on the 2021 and 2022 list of Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate™. So has been recognized with an Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award, JHTR’s Best Article of the Year Award, and the William Bradford Wiley Memorial Best Research Paper of the Year Award. In 2019, he was named a breakthrough star at the University of South Carolina. In both 2022 and 2023, he received the Richard W. Poole Research Excellence Award from the Spears School of Business. He has been awarded nearly $900,000 in research funding. He has chaired or served on the dissertation committees of more than 20 PhD students.

Keynote Abstract: The sharing economy is a digital socio-economic system that enables people to create, consume, and share products and services. It is transforming ecosystems of commerce, markets and consumption patterns globally. Various sectors such as food catering, accommodation, transportation and personal finance have witnessed the profound impact of the sharing economy on their development and existence. The platform-based system of collaborative consumption has been adopted by numerous innovative organizations and businesses. The dynamic landscape of the sharing economy has also reshaped marketing thought and led to extensive scholarly work aimed at understanding this disruptive form of consumption model. So presents empirical findings from his seven-year research program, providing an updated perspective on the sharing economy’s evolution and unintended consequences. He will also discuss future research directions based on a robust analysis of industry trends and literature from the general marketing domain and tourism and hospitality fields.

Jay Kandampully

Professor of service management and hospitality, Ohio State University

Date of Keynote: Feb. 24, 2023

Jay Kandampully is a professor of service management and hospitality in the Department of Human Sciences at the Ohio State University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Service Management and an international fellow at the Karlstad University in Sweden and at the University of Namur in Belgium. His scholarly expertise includes service management and marketing, service brands and service innovations. Kandampully holds a PhD in service quality management and an MBA in services marketing from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. He attained his professional credentials in hotel management from Salzburg, Austria, and University College Birmingham in the United Kingdom. 

Keynote Abstract: The lecture focuses on innovations in service, providing a collective look at the importance of collaboration in the ever-changing service industries.

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Laurie Wu

Associate professor, School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management, Temple University

Date of Keynote: April 21, 2023

Laurie Wu is an associate professor in the School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management at Temple University. As a service marketing scholar, Wu focuses her research on the themes of service experience design and service technology and innovation. Her work has been published in top-tier journals, funded by tourism and hospitality organizations around the globe, and recognized with numerous prestigious awards. Wu attained doctoral and master’s degrees in hotel, restaurant and institutional management from Pennsylvania State University and a bachelor’s degree in tourism management from Fudan University in China. Outside of research and teaching, she enjoys spending time exploring nature with her family.

Keynote Abstract: Amid the proliferation of service automation, the interactive balance between human and robotics in the contemporary hospitality service encounter has accumulated a plethora of practical and scholarly interest. The lecture informs a series of recent work centered on human and robotics copresence and coproduction in the contemporary service encounter, exploring the future of technology-centered innovations happening at the contemporary service encounter and discussing how innovation and heritage can be fused in the curation of excellent service experiences.  
Read more about Laurie’s keynote.