Knowledge-intensive business services: Users, carriers and sources of innovation

Abstract

It has now been recognised that services play a vital role in advanced industrial economies. In most European Union (EU) member states service activities now provide around two-thirds of all jobs and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and even higher proportion of total firms. More particularly services have provided the bulk of new jobs in the European economy and in a number of strategically important service sectors the EU has established a competitive advantage over its major trading partners, including the US and Japan. The contribution of services to technological innovation has also long been undervalued; service industries were seen as passive consumers of new technology, providing little or no input to innovation generation and diffusion. This major study by two EIMS consultant teams, from PREST in the UK and TNO from the Netherlands and mentored by Dr. Jeremy Howells of the University of Cambridge, seek to alter these outdated views of service innovation by focusing on a key service cluster involved in technological innovation, namely Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS).

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