Yes, some of the top ISSIP roles are demanding – especially being ISSIP VP is about one hour a week and one full day workshop, and ISSIP President is two hours a week and at least two full days of workshops – so a pretty serious commitment for sure, and not for the faint of heart. And a volunteer role, so takes times away from more gainful activities. The “honor” of being in the role is about the only reward, and knowing that you are helping a network of amazing people connect and grow as service innovations professionals. About 1000 in the network now, and 10 super-active, 100 semi-active, and 900 on-call to largely inactive. Many are amazing innovative systems thinkers and technologist such as yourself, often with a big social sciences component as well. Frankly, most have big optimistic hearts too. Every August we have 3-4 ISSIP members who get nominated for VP role that leads to President role. The ISSIP Board of Directors, likes the VP/President to move from semi-active to super-active role ISSIP member, in those two years. The top candidate pool is our ISSIP Ambassadors and/or ISSIP BEP book authors. More about the duties of ISSIP VP/President is here: https://service-science.info/archives/4901
And yes, ISSIP is a fun group, to me at least. I am happy to be a part of ISSIP, and on the Board of the non-profit professional association. Individual members (students, academics, executives, professionals, policy makers, etc.) join ISSIP for free. The monthly newsletter is the main communication vehicle, and we love it when members, send a 3-5 page draft POV on their interests and recent publications/blog posts, etc. when they can – and turn it into interviews in the newsletter or chapters in an ISSIP BEP book with their help of course. For ISSIP BEP book chapter publication, authors keep the copyright, and can point to other material. In recent ISSIP Discovery Summits, we got POV from experts at IBM, Cisco, Japan Science and Technology, etc. – who are the institutional members, and they pay to get institutional member benefits. Regarding skills for the future – this is the most recent ISSIP BEP book: https://www.amazon.com/T-Shaped-Professionals-Innovators-Yassi-Moghaddam-ebook/dp/B07GTBD5K6 – the first ISSIP network report came out before ISSIP was an established organization, and it is called the IBM-Cambridge SSME report: http://www.ssmenetuk.org/docs/Cambridge_SSME_Symposium_Discussion_Paper_Final.pdf While it is not academic rigor, it does seem to create a nice interface between industry, academy, government point of views- and helped student contributors to advance their bona fides and executives to get a bigger picture than the quarterly view of the business, and academics to get our of their silos for a bit – which is fun sometimes. ISSIP.org is a non-profit professional association, so it is primarily about individual members working and learning together on topics of interest, and sharing and improving points of view. And we know people get very busy with their day jobs, so no worries -if this is not of interest to our colleagues and friends. The next book will have chapters that report on an ISSIP Discovery Summit attended by speakers from IBM, Google, Accenture, Facebook, and we hope to gather additional POV chapters and content from the iSSIP.org network. Would be great to have chapter that summarizes you and your centers reports that are relevant. A chapter in an ISSIP book is a lot easier than writing a whole book of course. We try to draw our ISSIP Ambassadors first from Service Research centers from around the world, and then from organizations (businesses, universities, government agencies, other professional associations) that see the benefit of service innovation, and professional development of talent in those organizations.