The New Service Economy - KK-stiftelsen

The New Service Economy
As it stands today, almost all of CTF’s research could be considered under
the roof of ”service science.” Thus, if this is to be the overall focus, a
more precise definition of what this entails is needed.
CTF has good connections with Swedish companies. A delimitation of
the NSE-profile – as is the case with all the Knowledge Foundations’s profile
projects – was that only Swedish companies were able to participate.
However, in the future, CTF has to become more visible for international
companies and they have to use their very good networks to find international
partners as financiers of the projects not only in kind but also in
money. Perhaps an increased involvement in research programmes within
the EU could provide opportunities to develop in this direction.
6. Growth potential and sustainability
The rating for the financial performance of the research profile brought
about a lively discussion from the peer review team. Although the final
score given is a ”3”, this represents a compromise of two aspects of the discussion.
If we were to award a score solely for CTF it would be a ”5”.
However, we would award a ”1” to Karlstad University. In particular, we do
not believe Karlstad University has leveraged the Knowledge Foundation
investment in CTF to the extent they should have. The mindset of Karlstad
University appears to be to invest a minimal amount university funds into
CTF since funding has been self-generated and provided by the Knowledge
Foundation. Thus, instead of helping to make CTF a world-class service
research center, one that could help to raise the profile of Karlstad University,
university administrators have provided minimal support tot CTF.
CTF has used the financing of the Knowledge Foundation as a boost to
become one of the leading service research centers in the world. The collaboration
and co-financing of research projects from the industry was important
in building up the growth potential and the sustainability for the future.
CTF has fulfilled the goal to produce generic results for the partner firms
and will have the possibility to continue and develop the research on userdriven
service development with partly the same and new business partners
after the profile. However, the bilateral construction of the contracts between
the university and the companies may have caused fewer companies
to cooperate than would otherwise have been the case.
One may be a little pessimistic about CTF’s possibilities of getting Swedish
public financing in the future. Since the Swedish government has
launched a research strategy with 26 new themes and service is not one of
them, we question the willingness of the Swedish government to support
growth potential in service research.
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