The New Service Economy - KK-stiftelsen

The New Service Economy
experience. The general atmosphere of the environment seems to be innovative
and productive.
However, our general overview would be that emphasis should be put on
the long-term perspective, in terms of visions and strategic plans. These
could be improved, given the changing conditions in the academic world, on
national level as well as in European research politics, regarding new forms
of funding and fundraising. Our assessment is that the Centre’s personnel
and current organisational conditions together have good and available potential
for such a process, and our recommendation is that further strategic
planning ought to take place within the next years concerning the center’s
scientific vision and future funding.
One crucial element in this process would be to reinforce the academic
capacity with three senior researchers on professor level, together with two
or three post-doc positions. In addition to this, our general view is that that
the time is right to develop and improve the international academic network
one step further. This point will be elaborated further in the section “Academic
Collaboration” in this report.
In total, our general impression of the research environment is, as mentioned
above, that it lives up to high standards and shows good potential for
further strategic development in terms of visions, adaptation to the changing
environment and improvement by widening and strengthening the capacity
of the staff.
3. Academic Collaboration
CTF has an excellent national and international relationship to researchers.
In particular, their international network is extremely strong. They have
close collaboration with researchers in service marketing and common activities
with other departments (or centers) of service marketing. Their collaboration
with research institutions, particularly in the USA, is unique to
European service research institutions. For example, CTF has had a longstanding
close cooperation with the department of marketing and the Center
for Services Leadership at Arizona State University. They also have close
cooperation with European service marketing departments, for example in
the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands, and the University of Hamburg,
Germany. CTF also has relationships with service researchers within
other fields than marketing, including Europe, the USA, and Asia. CTF is
very visible in many service conferences throughout the world and the researchers
travel frequently to build networks and give lectures in foreign
universities. CTF also organises international conferences, particularly the
QUIS (Quality in Services) conference. Many foreign researchers visit CTF
and provide input to research and education at Karlstad University.
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