The New Service Economy - KK-stiftelsen

The New Service Economy
industry gave good momentum when entering the profile period. The ‘absorption
capacity’, that is, the ability of industry and academia to take advantage
of each other’s knowledge and competence, has been of crucial importance
for the outcome. Another factor of great importance has been the
well-functioning management – both when it comes to scientific leadership,
to the work environment and to the organisation of the profile. NSE has
benefited greatly from CTF’s capacity to build long-lasting and strong relations
within the research community as well as with industry. Finally, an
important part of NSE’s success is its ability to achieve methodological excellence
in combining different skills within the research environment.
The execution of the profile has also resulted in the acquisition of knowledge
that can be helpful in future projects, such as how to balance scientific
visions with pragmatic considerations or how to develop the reciprocal ‘absorption
capacity’ when academia and industry cooperate. A closely related
issue is the discovery that knowledge about how good services may be developed
does not necessarily include information on how to implement this
knowledge. This implies the need for even more integration between different
research areas in order to be able to understand and support the whole
development process in companies, and thus to further increase the benefit
from the cooperation.
The most important challenges that the research environment is facing
are how to proceed in creating more general and theoretically advanced research
findings, and how to increase the cooperation with, and benefit for,
small and medium-sized companies.
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