The focus of this year's Service Conference, organized by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and held at the Berlin Congress Center on May 27 and 28, 2014, was on the 'digitalization of society' and the associated changes and developments in the service industry. In this context, Professor Leimeister chaired the session "Crowdsourcing - new global value creation concepts", in which crowdsourcing as a possible future model of organizing IT-supported/digital work was discussed and debated by experts from research and practice.

After the introductory lecture by Professor Leimeister on the basic principles, terminology and application areas of crowdsourcing, three more lectures took place, which provided insights into the topic of crowdsourcing from different perspectives. As a representative of Applause - a crowdsourcing intermediary from the field of software testing - Marvin Burman first presented the functionality of crowdtesting as well as the central challenges of crowdsourcing intermediaries. Afterwards, Prof. Dr. Martin Przewloka, Senior Vice President of SAP AG, discussed the concrete application of crowdsourcing in the field of software development from the perspective of a crowdsourcing company. In the last presentation, the legal framework of crowd work was then addressed by Dr. Thomas Klebe, who works in the management of the Hugo Sinsheimer Institute.

The session featured representatives from business, politics and academia, who followed the presentations with a panel discussion on current challenges, opportunities and risks, and  research needs related to crowdsourcing and crowd work.

The field was also represented at the marketplaces of the Service Conference: On the topic island "Engineering of Services", Philipp Ebel had the opportunity to present the previous project results of the TANDEM project and to get to know the work within other funding priorities. In addition, there was the opportunity to talk to numerous interested parties from business practice about possible joint follow-up projects. Overall, Philipp Ebel draws a very positive conclusion: "It was really exciting to see what is happening in other funding areas. In particular, I found the overlaps in content surprising. All in all, the service conference was really top-notch, we had plenty of room for content-related discussions, the presentations were exciting and the supporting program was very entertaining."

Also for Nadine Hammer, who presented the Kultig project at the service conference, a complete success. "The talks I had were all very stimulating and I got some input on where the journey with Kultig can go. I will definitely be happy to come back!"