Professor Rey is a full professor in Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. He has served as president of the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and of the Authority for Information Technology in Public Administration (AIPA), a role often considered "the CIO of Italy." He has taught at the universities of Urbino, Rome La Sapienza, Florence and Roma Tre.

What impresses you most about the students you see applying to the SSME program at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna?

Their enthusiasm and their strong feeling that our masters program was an innovation in the field of education. In fact, graduates in engineering had the opportunity to get a job in the short term, but they preferred to postpone the entrance into the job market.

So they decided to stay in the masters program and get Service Science credentials before going into the job market?

Yes, they did. At the end of this first year, they will decide if it was worth the hard work and in a few years they will know if it was worth it to postpone one year to get into the labor market. I am confident they will because they work hard.

What motivated you to establish an advanced degree SSME program at Sant'Anna?

The motivation was the interdisciplinary nature of the degree together with the idea that the difficulties of the Italian economy were due to the lack of advanced services for Italian firms. Discipline distinction is an academic device to specialize research but in the real world—and, in particular, in a firm—you need to have managers who can understand the complexity of the problems, detect the possible solutions and choose the best supplier.

My role was to explore the possibilities of offering a new interdisciplinary masters degree to the young graduates who got a degree in engineering and had a poor curriculum in management and economics and, on the other side, to young economists who had no courses in information technology.

What kind of subjects do these students study?

The masters courses are subdivided into two parts: Management, Innovation and Technologies, where we examine business models, economics of innovation and services, IT services and reporting, organization models, personnel management and communication, and business intelligence; and, the second, Innovation and Services, which covers management of innovation in services, customer relationship management, e-commerce, supply chains, logistics, new products and new services for the innovative firm, cost and measurement of performance in the economics of services, financial services for innovation, knowledge management, and e-legislation. Furthermore, the students are doing research in customer relationship management, logistics and supply chains with the enterprises that sponsored the master's program, and in July 2008 they will discuss the outcome of their work.

How fast is the services economy growing in Italy?

The services sector is growing according with the trends of most industrialized countries and at the moment is around 70 percent of the GNP—but we still have a large traditional manufacturing industry, as well. In Italy, the services sector is in fact a protected sector that undermines the competitiveness of the Italian economy. The increase in services that we observed had the aim of reducing costs but not the leading idea that the value creation in an industrialized economy is coming from the development of services.

Are you seeing this kind of attention to SSME across academic institutions in Italy, or is there resistance to studying services as a science?

We are just at the very beginning and the academic institutions are conservative; my colleagues don't feel it necessary to do research in the field of service science and don't appreciate an interdisciplinary approach for academic reasons as long as the research work is mainly specialized. In Italy, you get tenure after a national public contest and the commission is made up of professors from specific disciplines. If you don't have [an established] discipline, you don't have the possibility of getting tenure. Furthermore, those who participate in the competition will be keen to select the commission where they have the highest probability of winning tenure.

So if you haven't full professors you will not have a commission but if you have no commission—for instance, in SSME—you will not have the possibility to have tenure. So the process is: a group of full professors starts to teach and research SSME, then they get from their faculty a recognition of their discipline, then the ministry of universities recognizes the discipline and then it is possible to get new full professors—because you have the commission, the discipline and a faculty who hold a public contest to have a full professor in this new discipline. (I hope that is clear enough—although the whole process is also not entirely clear to us!)