The New Service Economy - KK-stiftelsen

The New Service Economy
• NSE has been well managed and organised, which has rendered it recognition
within an academic context, as well as within the industry and
the public sector in Scandinavia. The internal organisation of work and
administrative support live up to high standards.
• The general atmosphere of the environment seems to be innovative and
productive.
• The NSE profile has had an impact on the education on BSc, MSc and
graduate level. It has provided the opportunity for a large number of students
to be intimately involved in real world, research projects with
companies. Clearly there is a strong connection between the research
profile and students’ educational experiences.
• Most activities within the profile have been highly related to industry
needs; during the NSE profile CTF has done a good job in transferring
the research knowledge to the cooperating partner firms and influenced
the companies’ culture.
• CTF have been successful in building sustainable relationships with industry,
and will have the possibility to continue to develop the research
on user-driven service development with many of the same and new
business partners after the profile.
Recommendations
The profile is close to the top, but:
• CTF needs to make major theoretical contributions (breakthroughs) to
the service marketing and management discipline in order to become
“world-class” in terms of its research. What is missing, the review panel
believe, is a more and clear visionary thinking as to the type and nature
of research projects to undertake. They see Service science and service
innovation as two potential unifying themes.
• CTF should concentrate more on increasing the quality of their publications
rather than the amount of the publications, and on finding a metric
that assesses the quality, and not only the quantity, of publications.
• CTF need to emphasize the long-term perspective when it comes to personnel
and organisation. In the future they should try to reinforce the
academic capacity with three senior researchers on professor level, together
with two or three post-doc positions.
• Although CTF during the NSE profile has developed a large network of
contacts internationally, perhaps CTF should exploit their extremely
good international relationships to be more strategic and focused in the
future. More intense and selective international collaboration could increase
the scientific level of the research and help to contribute to more
meaningful jumps in theoretical understanding and empirical results.
• To become more attractive to future students, and compete for students
outside of Sweden (particularly European students), CTF should consider
expanding its company network beyond local and regional companies.
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