Christian Grönroos is Professor of Service and Relationship Marketing at the Hanken Swedish School of Economic and Business Administration in Finland. He is also the Chairman of the board of its research and knowledge centre, CERS – Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management. He is the author of the best-selling textbook Service Management and Marketing – now in its third edition. Grönroos is a pioneer in his field and is one of the first to be associated with the term ‘service management’ to describe market-oriented management. He also introduced the concept of ‘service competition’ to describe modern service and information technology driven competition.