Anu Helkkula, M.Sc. (Econ.) will defend her doctoral dissertation at Hanken School of Economics on 17 August 2010 at 12 noon.

The title of the dissertation is
"Service Experience in an Innovation Context".
Professor Stephen Vargo, University of Hawaii, will act as her opponent and Professor Christian Grönroos, Hanken School of Economics, will act as kustos.

A customer's experience of a service and its value is based on both practically lived and imaginary user experiences. In her doctoral dissertation, Anu Helkkula, M.Sc. (Econ.), presents a new method for studying both lived and imaginary service experiences and how the value of services is experienced. Moreover, the method creates new opportunities to develop service innovations.

The doctoral dissertation of Anu Helkkula, M.Sc. (Econ.), Service Experience in an Innovation Context, will be publicly examined at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki on 17 August. The dissertation uses a phenomenological approach, which focuses on individual subjective service experiences within a social context. These experiences can be based on practically lived or imaginary events.

Both researchers and practitioners engaged in developing services recognise the importance of service experience in service research. To date there has not been a comprehensive review of service experience research. Anu Helkkula's dissertation fills this gap with a comprehensive summary of different ways to characterise service experience in recent research.

Anu Helkkula presents a new method to analyse service experience, which she has developed together with Minna Pihlström, D.Sc. (Econ.). The method has been named the Event-Based Narrative Inquiry Technique (EBNIT). The respondents are encouraged to come out of the box in order to trigger creative thinking. The respondents, for example, contemplate how a practically lived event would take place in an ideal world where any experience is possible with a stroke of a magic wand.

The method is used to analyse the respondents' narratives about services in their own lifeworld. This has opened up new perspectives on how users make sense of their service experiences and its value. Moreover, the method enables generating completely new and, to date, non-existent services and determining how these would be experienced and valued.

In her dissertation, Anu Helkkula has studied the phenomenon of service experience relating to mobile phone services and location aware services for vehicles as well as municipal services, such as day care, health care and cultural services. The common feature of these services is that people experience these services in their own life or work as a member of various groups. Customer service experiences are shared with others and consequently other people's experiences are intertwined with the individual's own experiences.

The thesis can be read at the library's digital depository of Hanken research: DHanken: www.hanken.fi/dhanken