Category: cers-blog

Design and business, which seem to be completely different from each other, turn out to be firmly related.   As a person coming from business background, the Master degree in Business Design Management completely changed my mindset and value toward business and design. Before taking the program, I even thought that they would teach us …

  Marketing scholars hold an interesting position: They often know well ahead before practioners which are the trends and concepts that will conquer the field of marketing in the coming years, and which terms will turn to buzzwords that business consultants will write books and preach about, in their seminars.   What scholars often do …

“The botanist looking at a daffodil has no reason to dispute the right of the poet to look at the same object in a very different manner. There are many ways of playing. The point is not that one denies other people’s games but that one is clear about the rules of one’s own.” Those …

In our new book, Service Strategy in Action (S2iA), Professor Wolfgang Ulaga, AT&T Professor of Services Leadership and Co-Executive Director at the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University, and I show how to shift from a goods-centric business model to a service-savvy one. For over a decade, we have accompanied numerous firms on …

I recently took a PhD-level course about the evolution of marketing theory. While learning about the origins of marketing as a concept, I also started to reflect upon my own thesis topic – branding – through a historical lens. While marketing and branding might typically be considered modern practices in society, they actually have roots …

It’s a paradox. The technology that was meant to unite us, is actually separating us. The events during the last years – Brexit, Trump’s victory, the advancement of populism and polarisation across the world – are examples of phenomena that have at least partially been accelerated by technological developments, social platforms, and the exponential increase …

Have you thought about why relationships don’t last forever? Or, why some relationships don’t end even if they probably should? And, how come that it is so difficult to end or break free from many relationships? Relationships in general, and in particular how they come about and end, are indeed fascinating. They are challenging not …

How can novel value cocreation be enhanced in service innovations, and what are the different archetypes of service innovation? Our Journal of Service Research article presents the value-centric approach of service innovation, and how it combines the current archetypes of service innovation that are presented in literature (Open gold access). Service innovation is a key …

After several years of working on it, I’m happy to inform that we just got our study about service productivity and service innovation accepted at Journal of Service Research (JSR)– with Jan Klein (Tilburg University), Henrikki Tikkanen (Aalto University), and Xueming Luo (Temple University). The final title for the study is, “The Dilemma of Service …

I have always loved products labelled “Made in Finland”. True or not, I have thought this way we can keep the Finnish society going as jobs stay in Finland, quality remains secured, and our environment is better off, thanks to the high environmental protection laws. But do the Finnish companies offer high quality made in …