Considerable business can be generated from services. The aim now of Tekes – Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation is to develop the competitiveness of services in Finland and to promote the creation of new services that will be successful on the international stage.

Tekes’s Serve – Innovative Services Technology Programme is rousing Finnish companies to innovative activity. Serve is encouraging companies to develop new, innovative service concepts that can be duplicated. At the same time there is a desire to improve the quality of services and promote research into them.

“Service innovations have great significance in all sectors. Finnish business life is being strengthened and regenerated by service concepts and business models that are competitive internationally,” says Minna Suutari, the programme manager.

Similar challenges

Tekes – Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation is financing the research, development and innovation projects of companies and the research projects that promote targets in the plan of universities and research institutes.

The Serve programme is aimed at companies that systematically develop new service concepts. The target group includes industry’s service business, competence-intensive business-life services, trade, logistics and the financial sector.

Suutari says that the main challenges for the service business are very much the same in various sectors. “There is room for improvement in understanding customers, managing the service business, developing the service concept and networking.”

Tools and networking

Serve provides companies with opportunities for networking both in seminars and sector-based forums. The companies also obtain the tools for developing and productizing their operations and for operating internationally.

By the end of 2007 more than 90 corporate projects and some 30 research projects had been financed – at a total cost of 31 million euros.

“Most of the financing is allocated to competence-intensive business-life services, industry’s service business and to services in the property business,” says Suutari.

>> www.tekes.fi/serve

The Serve programme is being implemented by Tekes between 2006 and 2010. The total budget for the programme is about 100 million euros.
(Photo: Henriikka Ahtiainen)