Building synergies in industrial service production through life cycle thinking and complexity based knowledge management

Traditional industries are going through a radical change, where maintaining their profitability requires a decisive step towards offering a combination of products and related services. Purchasing, developing and tailoring of products and services, in the mutual relation of customer and supplier, require an investment for knowledge sharing and to the learning process. This paper has two main objectives. First, it offers a way of seeing the industrial services as a knowledge intensive service where the services are created through the accumulated knowledge. Second, it assesses life cycle and complexity thinking as conceptual tools, which could be used for elaborating knowledge in the industrial service business.