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

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 r…