Increasing Role of Services : Trends, Drivers and Search for New Perspectives

Abstract

Increasing role of services is often described as tertiarization of the economy, that is, the increased share of the services sector employment and value added. In business and engineering sciences the same phenomena are investigated at the level of company operations, value networks as well as system innovations and system-level transitions. What was described as a service economy in fifty or twenty years ago, are not the same ideas of a service economy that are investigated today. This chapter provides a broad overview on the increasing role of services: how this phenomenon has been addressed in different fields, including the forestbased sector research. Taking the observation from the research on services and related changes in business and production systems, three developments in the forest-based sector are described: biorefineries, building systems and forest big data exemplify the challenges in assessing the role of services and their outlook. The forest-based sector and its role in the evolving circular bioeconomy can contribute to the development of service economy conceptualizations, but clarification of the core concepts is needed: without an overview on the issues, concepts and models of service research, it is difficult to position the forest-based sector or its services into a wider debate about evolving production modes or what is called as a ‘service economy’.