Scientific Research
University and business in the service of change
ASAP is the national, and one of the leading European, benchmarks in service management.
Our Interuniversity Research Center relies on collaboration between scientific research professionals, entrepreneurs, and business managers to respond to the needs of change and the evolution of services in enterprises.
Through targeted research projects, industry studies, and wide-ranging surveys, we highlight current industry issues and possible solutions. Research findings are disseminated through publications, workshops, and ASAP community forums to be transferred into concrete business strategies.
Research activities for business innovation
ASAP’s scientific research involves both wide-ranging investigations of frontier issues concerning servitization and advanced service development and specific research projects in response to identified problems.
The contribution of different parties, in business and academic research, contributes to the effectiveness and comprehensiveness of the investigations. Specifically, ASAP’s research activities include:
Community Research
The Community Research project takes place annually and is conducted under the responsibility of a defined research team. Topics are discussed and selected based on the prevailing interests of the community and agreed upon collegially at community meetings at the beginning of the year.
Research in this area makes use of the active involvement of a selected number of companies in the community, chosen as the unit of analysis because they are successful cases about projects, activities, and experiences on the topics under investigation.
Focused Research
Focused research projects are activated as a result of specific proposals from community sections. The goal is to investigate topics of interest to a particular industry sector, category, or supply chain of companies.
As custom projects, often activated on-demand, they vary in duration, from several weeks to many months, depending on the complexity and breadth of the investigation spectrum.
Research in this area may be conducted for free or require grants and funding from public agencies and/or donations or sponsorship from private entities.
Search Observatory
Research of this type is wide-ranging surveys, conducted periodically in the form of surveys and observations.
The objective is to investigate the consistency and evolution of data phenomena, both at the national and supranational level, by collecting data from numerically relevant, and therefore statistically significant, samples.
The data relate to firms not necessarily members of the community and also operating in sectors other than those typical of the ASAP community.
Disseminating knowledge to produce results
An integral part of ASAP’s mission is the dissemination of knowledge obtained through scientific research for the benefit of all stakeholders and other possible audiences.
We firmly believe that only an open and dynamic ecosystem can enable truly effective and meaningful evolution. To this end, we share the contributions of the research described above through multiple forms.
To the academic community, through:
- Articles presented at scientific conferences such as the Spring Servitization Conference and the International Conference on Business Servitization, and published in their respective proceedings;
- Scientific articles published in high-impact international journals in the fields of management science and engineering. Some of our best publications have won awards for the impact produced (e.g., articles with the highest number of citations, with the highest number of downloads), and have attracted the interest of researchers from leading national and supranational bodies and agencies.
To the industrial community, through:
- Dissemination articles published in printed trade journals and online newspapers, targeting managers, entrepreneurs, and consultants;
- Research reports (white papers) in the ASAP series, mostly disseminated to community member companies;
- Presentations made by researchers and managers, in seminars, workshops, events, and conferences-both physical and virtual-organized both by ASAP for dissemination towards our community, and by other parties (associations, companies, institutions, and media partners). In this case, the most relevant dissemination context is provided by the annual conference, the so-called “ASAP FORUM,” which we have been organizing in the fall since 2003 to bring the community together and share the knowledge generated and the results achieved throughout the year through the various research activities.
Find out about other ASAP activities or contact us for information.