Organization of Knowledge and Innovation: The Case of Finnish Business Services

Industry and Innovation, Jun 2005 by Leiponen, Aija

Future research could explore science-based business services more closely to understand the sources of innovations and service improvements there. Also, generalizability of these results should be assessed with other data-sets and in other business service industries.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Innovation Networks research program of SITRA, the Finnish Foundation for R&D. Both funding and substantive comments by the program participants are greatly appreciated. The remaining errors are the author's alone.

1 Service industries in the Finnish Community Innovation Survey included energy utilities, wholesale trade, land transport, water transport, telecommunication services, financial intermediation, insurance, auxiliary financial services, computer and related services, and technical services (architecture and engineering).

2 According to Statistics Finland (www.stat.fi), for instance, the service sector excluding construction produced 62 percent of the GDP and employed 40 percent of the available workforce in Finland in 2001.

3 For example, do not participate in the targeted industries, have merged, or have gone out of business. Service subsidiaries of manufacturing corporations were also excluded.

4 This average number of employees of the surveyed firms, 29, is different from that in Table 1 because the Statistics Finland data is a few years older.

5 Industrial design refers here to services contributing to aesthetic, ergonomic, and functional aspects of new products. These services are to be distinguished from more technologically oriented engineering design and less product development oriented graphic design. However, overlapping areas of activity and expertise also exist.

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