P. K. Kannan is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Service and
the Harvey Sanders Associate Professor of Marketing at the Robert H.
Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.
His current research focus is on Service Science, Management and
Engineering (SSME). As part of his center activities, he is working with
several organizations—business, government, and think tanks, both in
the U.S. and abroad—to develop an agenda of research and practice
focused on service excellence. His other interests focus on new product/
service development, design and pricing digital products and product
lines, marketing and product development on the Internet,
e-service, social networks, and customer relationship management
(CRM) and customer loyalty. He has received several grants from the
National Science Foundation (NSF), Mellon Foundation, SAIC, and IBM
for his work in this area. His research papers have been published in
Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Communications of the ACM.
Dr. Kannan’s research has won the prestigious John Little Best Paper Award (2008) and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Practice Prize Award (2007). He was also a panelist in the NSF Workshop
on Research Priorities in e-Commerce (1998) and a Fellow of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Consortium on e-Commerce (2001). He serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, and International Journal of Electronic Commerce. He has served as the chair for the American Marketing Association Special
Interest Group on Marketing Research and is a member of INFORMS and AMA.
His teaching interests include social media and social networks, customer relationship management, new product development, Internet retailing and pricing, and marketing models/research. He has taught
courses on these topics in executive programs for Black & Decker, Home Depot, ARINC, McCormick, Northrop Grumman, and Hughes Network Systems. He has corporate experience with Tata Engineering
and Ingersoll-Rand, and has consulted for companies such as Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, Giant Food, Black & Decker, SAIC, Fannie Mae, and IBM.
Dr. Kannan received his Ph.D. in management and marketing from the Krannert Graduate School of Management, Purdue University.