Serve
Serve – Innovative Services is a five-year technology programme that aims to boost the development of innovative service concepts and new service business models. Serve programme runs from 2006-2010 and the total budget is about 100 million Euros, where half is public funding and other half comes from the participating companies. Serve provides Finnish companies and research organizations with project funding, national and international networks through seminars and industry specific forums as well as tools to support product management and IPR questions.
Serve – Innovative Services programme supports Finnish companies and research organizations in development of innovative service concepts that can be reproduced or replicated and where some technology or systematic method is applied. The Serve programme targets:
- to increase the productization capabilities of the service industries especially in professional services sector
- to promote systematic development of customer oriented service processes of small and medium-sized enterprises.
- to boost the development of new business models based on service innovations in different sectors
The programme provides funding for challenging projects, where the novelty value is at least of national level. The project proposals are evaluated based primarily on the novelty of the service innovation, not necessarily on the novelty of the applied technology.
The Serve programme aims to develop both the supply and demand side of services as well as academic research on service science. In service supply side the programme focus is on:
- Professional services especially knowledge intensive business services (KIBS)
- Trade
- Finance and insurance
- Logistics
- Real estate
- Industrial services
