Against this background, the purpose of the PhD course is to give students insight into the current theories and research of innovation in services, in both private and public sector, with emphasis on commonalities and differences between the two. It provides an overview of the services research field and different scholarly traditions within it. This includes how they relate to the broader field of innovation studies. Based on this, it addresses ongoing discussions of what public and private service innovations are and how they are created, organized and disseminated. Topics that will be covered include intrinsic characteristics of services provision, the importance of ‘front end’ innovations, and patterns of innovation collaboration, including public-private partnerships.

Innovations, processes and outcome in private-sector services will be illuminated by studies of knowledge intensive business services and the culture industry. Furthermore, the course will examine intrinsic characteristics and the particular value context of public-sector innovation. Finally, questions related to the social implications of the services economy will be raised.

The development, provision and use of services constitute a large and growing proportion of economic activity. For one, it is increasingly acknowledged that industries traditionally thought of as manufacturers of goods are providing not physical artefacts but a ‘service’ to their customers. Moreover, growth in the involvement of services industries in international trade due to technological and regulatory change has gone hand in hand with employment growth occurring foremost outside the domains of traditional manufacturing industries. While this has been particularly pronounced in the ‘new technology based services’ that emerged from the ICT revolution, the last decades have also witnessed vibrant growth dynamics in creative and cultural industries, in tourism and in traditional business services such as finance and management consultancy. These economic sectors are important in their own right. Moreover, they provide firms outside the services sectors with knowledge and complementary capabilities and serve as nodes in innovation networks that operate at different spatial scales. Thus, the emergence and growth of these sectors is integral to an industrial landscape where inter-sector knowledge flows and combinatorial knowledge bases are essential to the dynamics of territorial economies.

As a result, it is becoming increasingly important for research and policy to understand the intrinsic characteristics of services innovation. This applies as well to the public sector, which in most European countries faces vast challenges because globalization, high unemployment and demographic change creates a mismatch between the potential for growth in tax incomes, and the growing demand for health and care services that follow in the wake of aging populations. Moreover, the demands put on public research and education policy, and on industrial policy more generally, by the need to recover from the financial crisis and accelerate economic growth while tacking environmental issues, are perhaps unprecedented. This translates into a need for public sector innovation, i.e. into a need to stimulate beneficial change in policies, institutions and the services they provide, in a context where professional or bureaucratic traditions often are strong, while risks are high and democratic accountability concerns pressing.