Jrene Ng

The third S-D Logic award was presented to Irene Ng in Venice, Italy during June 2016 at the Forum on Markets and Marketing (FMM 2016).

Irene is a Professor of Marketing and Service Systems and the Director of the International Institute for Product and Service Innovation at Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick. She is also a Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Irene was an entrepreneur and practitioner for 16 years before switching to an academic career. During her time in industry she occupied a number of senior positions in industry, including CEO of SA Tours and Travel group of companies (Singapore, Malaysia, China and UK) and founder of Empress Cruise Lines, a company with an annual turnover of USD250m that she sold in 1996. An industrial economist through her doctoral training, Irene brings the customer centricity of marketing into the understanding, design and engineering of complex service systems such as platforms, markets, industrial outcome-based contracts and the Internet-of-Things. Her research specifically develops on the understanding of value; creating, designing, pricing, contracting and innovating based on value, embedded within new economic and business models of complex service systems.
She has applied S-D logic to various knowledge domains and has published numerous international and well acclaimed articles in operations management, supply chain, Internet-of-Things, engineering and marketing.
She has authored two books - 'The Pricing & Revenue Management of Services: A Strategic Approach' and the highly acclaimed ‘Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy', published by Cambridge University Press (Kindle edition available on Amazon). She is currently writing her third book The Future of Things, which will be published in early 2017. She is also lead editor of the book 'Complex Engineering Service Systems: Concepts and Research'.

Irene’s expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas as evidenced by a grant portfolio in excess of £10m from UK research councils across both Engineering and Physical Social Research Council (EPSRC) as well as Economics and Social Science research council (ESRC). Her work in applying S-D logic to service systems has created breakthrough innovations covering the design and understanding of personal data market and its economic model; design and delivery of outcome-based industrial contracts; the understanding of collaborative aspects of health and healthcare education; and the conceptualizations of the Internet-of-Things.
She is the recipient of several Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) fellowship appointments, including being one of six UK Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Research Services Fellows, the ESRC/NIHR Placement Fellow and more recently, appointed one of five ESRC/InnovateUK Innovation Caucus Thought leaders working with the UK government innovation arm, InnovateUK and the ESRC (http://innovationcaucus.co.uk/). She is one of the inventors of the HAT (http://hubofallthings.com) developed through a £1.2m Research Councils UK (RCUK) grant project and her work in the design of the HAT personal data ecosystem led to the founding of the HAT community foundation (http://hatcommunity.org) and the HAT Data Exchange Ltd (http://hatdex.org Her most recent project – the HAT Living Labs (http://hubofallthings.com/hall) a £1m grant funded by the UK government, has led her to establish an open digital research platform for researchers globally to come together to conduct research on digital economy platforms and markets.

Both an entrepreneur and an academic, Irene is a modern day polymath who is passionate about the link between practice and research. She is an advisor to several organizations on disruptive financial models in digital businesses as well as an investor in various startup ventures.