Academic alliance between Océ, Canon, Maastricht University and Municipality of Venlo
TOKYO, Japan and VENLO, The Netherlands, May 2, 2011—Professor Jos Lemmink has been appointed to the Canon-Océ Endowed Chair in Business Services Innovation. The Endowed Chair will promote innovation and knowledge development in the vicinity of Venlo, the home city of Océ, an international leader in digital document management and a Canon Group company since March 2010.
The Endowed Chair in Business Services Innovation was presented to the Mayor of Venlo by Mr. Fujio Mitarai, Chairman and CEO of Canon Inc., during his visit to Venlo in October 2010. The Chair is to be established at the Venlo campus of Maastricht University. Canon and Océ intend to jointly fund the Endowed Chair for a period of five years. Developing new services related to documents is an interesting growth market for the Canon-Océ combination.
Maastricht University has been exploring these document-related services intensely. Professor Lemmink, a Dutch national, is currently Dean of the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University and respected worldwide as an academic authority in services marketing and management. "I am delighted to be appointed to the Canon-Océ Endowed Chair," he said. "The challenge of developing new ways of managing, storing, transferring and retrieving documents is fully in line with the way in which organizations increasingly work. Control of the overall document flow can be executed more efficiently and at lower cost through the application of new services related to documents."
One of the reasons why Canon made a public offer for the shares of Océ was the innovative power of Océ in developing new document-related services. Océ, the newest member of the global Canon Group, is spearheading an innovative knowledge center in Venlo known as Document Services Valley where specialists develop new services related to documents. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Province of Limburg granted Document Services Valley a subsidy of EUR 1.2 million in November 2010 towards the establishment of an open innovation center. Companies, governments and knowledge institutes will work together within this center to research and develop document services.
The appointment today of Professor Dr. J.G.A.M. Lemmink to the Canon-Océ Endowed Chair in Business Services Innovation marks the next step in this convincing and compelling cooperation between academic analysis and the international document services community. In addition to this new role, Lemmink is also professor of Marketing and founder of the Service Science Factory. In recent years, he has been a business services innovation consultant for organizations ranging from Océ to the European Commission.
Born in 1957, Lemmink holds a degree in Business Administration from the University of Groningen, in the northern Netherlands, and a Ph.D. from Maastricht University. He was a market researcher for the Dutch Postal Services and Telecommunication and visiting professor or Fellow at various universities in Australia, Belgium, Mexico and the United States. He has published extensively on service quality management. His research interests concern service management and marketing, analyses of service processes and marketing and new media. He was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Service Industry Management.
