I have just returned from Madrid, where I attended a large international gathering with a focus on customer-driven innovation. The event was organised by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and researchers from all over the world attended. Several interesting conclusions were drawn, including that research shows that organisations conduct their innovation work based on an internal organisational logic, while at the same time claiming that the ability to understand the customer’s value creation is an important success factor. It is obvious that this does not really add up and we discussed how to improve this work based on a customer logic. This is not entirely easy, but we agreed that organisations that work with their organisational culture, and constantly strive to improve their customer relations, are more likely to succeed.
Another thing that strikes me is that innovation is challenging in academia as well. CTF is an organisation that constantly tries to develop its research and meet the challenges that exist in our society, in our companies and public organisations. But the institutions we are governed by, such as funders, scientific journals, promotion systems and incentive structures all contribute to holding back the innovative power of our researchers. A future study that would be of interest would be to look at how Swedish academia succeeds in innovation.
Summer holidays are just around corner, but I look forward to an autumn semester where we will continue our work to create exciting research in collaboration with various partners. We have a lot of activities lined up, especially within our expert programme, ISE, where we will be offering a number of different courses for professionals to deepen their knowledge in areas such as service innovation.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank all our partners, and not least the CTF team for this spring and wish you all a wonderful summer. Summer holidays await and I thought I would try to devote myself to reading something other than research reports. Waiting in the hammock is a book called “Calypso” by American comedian David Sedaris, where he writes about the times we live in with humor and honesty.
Have a fantastic summer and hope to see you again soon!
Sunshine from Karlstad
Per Kristensson, Professor, Director of CTF
