8.2.2010
New research projects on innovation in services.

SC-Research is conducting two new research projects as a part of Serve-programme coordinated by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation Tekes.

Leading Service Excellence-project addresses two major issues in service innovation domain and these two research modules have been designed to complement each other. Part I of the project looks into service typologies and classifications. The objective is to improve existing service classifications, and to develop new classifications and typologies that will make service business landscape more transparent. The second part of the research project is based on business case study analysis in Finland and overseas. These cases provide rich empirical content for the typologies developed in Part I of the project. At the same time developed typologies create better understanding on the determinants of successful implementation of innovative ideas in the context of different types of services.

The second one, Enabling service innovation through ethnography-project explores service innovation with an ethnographic approach and has two parallel goals: it advances the idea that anthropological approaches are of key importance in enabling service innovation and it explores how insights gained with ethnographic knowledge can generate innovative new concepts. The research done in the project consists of an analysis of existing
literature on service innovation and of ethnographic fieldwork that
aims to identify important future openings for promising service
innovations.

Anthropological approaches have started to feature more prominently in
innovation discourses in recent years and this project contributes to
this emerging politics of innovation that redirects the attention from
seeing innovation merely in terms of technology and economic surplus
to more realistic and contextual, human-centric approaches to
production of new value.

For more information, please contact jari.kuusisto(at)sci.fi