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, re- quire 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 knowl- edge in the industrial service business.