CTF expands, and during the last two months we have three new colleagues. Here is a short presentation of our new Ph D Students.
Johan Högberg, Ph D Student in Psychology, will conduct his research within the field of Transformative Service Research with Professor Per Kristensson as main supervisor.
You are now back in Spain after spending four months at CTF. What were your expectations before you came here, and what have you achieved during your visit?
- My expectations before coming here were basically: learning new ways of working and presenting my research at an international level, deepening my dissertation research with the brilliant researchers of CTF, attending research courses, and trying to build partnerships for future research.
CTF’s efforts to develop groundbreaking theoretical knowledge has resulted in multidisciplinary research themes: Service Innovation, Service Management, and Service Experience. Based on these themes CTF is now developing a crosscutting theme on Transformative Service Research, TSR. It is a relatively new field in service research and is increasingly getting more attention in academia.
One year has passed since CTF was appointed "Excellent research group" at Karlstad University, and much has happened since then. Among other things, a new research area – Transformative Service Research – has been initiated along with new researchers and Ph.
On November 13-14, the IBS Conference, 3rd International Conference on Business Servitization, was held in Bilbao, Spain. Servitization, which was the theme of the conference, is what happens when manufacturing companies start focusing on services.
At the conference CTF was represented by researchers Nina Löfberg, Lars Witell and Maria åkesson.
In order to grow and to survive, a firm must create value with consumers in ways that both fit in with consumer demands and stand out from competitors. In a new doctoral thesis from CTF, Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Claes Högström describes different approaches to accomplishing this from a consumer experience perspective.
- In my dissertation I examine how value is created in the interactions between consumers and businesses.
We welcome Frida Skarin, new Ph D Student in Psychology at Samot. She will conduct her Ph D studies within the research area Transformative Service Research, and her supervisor is Associate Professor Lars E Olsson.
Frida Skarin has a Master's Degree in Applied Positive Psychology from University of East London. She has previously worked as a teacher in mental coaching and conflict management at the Swedish National Police Academy.
We welcome Alexandre Sukhov, new Ph. D student in Business Administration. He has an interest in the methodologies for service innovations, and is studying the impact of idea refinement and its implications in the idea assessment process. The purpose is to find ways of generating and selecting ideas that lead to an increased rate of product and service innovations.
Anne-Maria and Gustaf Ander Foundation for Media Research continues to support CTF, Service Research Center at Karlstad University. The research center will receive 1,3 million SEK for the period 2014-2017.
The money will be used to fund two Visiting Professorships during the next three years at CTF. The Visiting Professors are: Thorsten Gruber, Loughborough University, UK, and Stephen L.
During this fall, CTF will be holding webinars within service innovation. The first webinar will be held by Professor Per Kristensson who will talk about Service Logic on October 10th.
Good things always happen when influential open-minded and intelligent people meet; this is the simple underlying idea of forming an international network of service researchers.
The inaugural meeting was hosted in September by CTF.
The target audience for the event was mainly leading researchers from the different research centers around the globe and in the end there were 35 attendees from 13 countries.
- We feel that there are strength in numbers; if we are able to st
Hello, Mikko Laamanen, Ph D Student at the Department of Marketing and the CERS Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management at Hanken School of Economics, Finland!
Professor in Business Administration and Assistant Vice-Chancellor of Karlstad University. This spring you were invited to Monterrey Tech and EGADE Business School in Mexico to discuss research and collaboration. Can you tell us about some of your impressions from the trip?
- Monterrey Tech, which is considered to be one of the top universities in South America, has well-developed
collaboration with other universities, companies and organizations.
On June 26th - 29th researchers from CTF, together with more than 200 service researchers and business leaders from around the world, gathered in Miami, Florida, to discuss and present the latest trends and research results in the customer service and customer experience at the annual Frontiers in Service Conference.
In today’s society there is a large amount of data available that businesses and organizations can use to, for example, develop new services.
Ph D Student Pablo Moreno from the Spanish Science and Education Ministry will be a visiting us until end of December. We asked him what kind of research he is working on within his doctoral studies.
- My research area is within service innovation. I focus on different
relationships among customers and frontline employees, and their involvement in each of the developmental stages of new services.
We caught up with Professor Stephen Osborne, Chair of International Public Management and Deputy Dean of the Business School at University of Edinburgh, who is visiting us this week to meet with researchers Johan Quist and Martin Fransson.
Hello Professor Osborne, and welcome to CTF!
We welcome Linda Bergkvist, Ph. D in Information Systems, to our research team. She defended her thesis on outsourcing in the IT industry in June, and will now pursue her research at CTF.
- Towards new challenges. That was the opening words in the preface of my dissertation. I remember my time
as a graduate student as joyful and rewarding, and it is with a smile that I now continue my academic journey.
Imagine that you are passing by the store window and through a message in your cell phone you are welcomed into the store, and you also get an offer to buy three products for the price of two. Or, you can easily find your way back to your parked car even though you forgot on which level you parked.
Professors Patrik Larsson, CTF, and Lena Gonäs, Working Life Science at Karlstad University, have contributed to this book with a chapter on the Swedish development of human resource management entitled "Employment Regimes and Personnel Work in Sweden".
The book contains studies of the historical development of human resource management (HRM) in
seventeen different nations.
Ph. D student in Psychology at CTF. You just came back from Bonn, Germany, what did you do there?
- I participated in a doctoral course on decision making at Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective.
Interesting, can you tell us more about the course?
- In the course we studied how to create and test models on how we think when we make decisions.
