Product-Service Innovation

Purpose and goal

The goal of the project was to strengthen research through the exchange of knowledge of need based innovation for integrated solutions. The aim was to examine what those solutions meant for the work in the early development phases. The knowledge exchange has ensured that the research has been able to explore alternative perspectives. Thus, a complementary and innovative approach is defined. This focuses primarily on how problems can be formulated and how they contribute to the generation of ideas. Tools and methods for this have been initiated and tested in courses and with companies.

Expected results and effects

The project´s studies have clarified practices and traditions of established product innovation, and discussed possible changes towards service innovation. An expected effect was that the various fundamental arguments, i.e. product innovation towards service innovation, would contribute to sustainable solutions that better meet customer needs. The conceptual explanatory models that have been used in the project illustrate the differences in reasoning, and suggest that the innovation process is recommended to start from common problematization of the identified criteria.

Planned approach and implementation

Integrated solutions are inherently cross-border and through exchanges in the project interaction with different environments became doable. By participating early in course development and teaching discussions became fairly rapidly directed to new areas of knowledge. The formal part of knowledge sharing within the project has therefore been made for example through joint publications, research project plans and other existing academic tasks. The informal dialogues with academia and industry have been very important for the expanded network.