Professor Bård Tronvoll, Professor Bo Edvardsson, Professor Thorsten Gruber, Mr Kotaiba Aal and Professor Per Skålén

As part of his Ander Foundation Visiting Professorship, CSM Director Professor Thorsten Gruber spent a week at CTF – Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden. CTF is one of the world's leading research centres focusing on service management and value creation through service. 

In addition to attending several research meetings, Professor Gruber gave a lecture on service failure and recovery to undergraduate students. The lecture also presented research findings from a study conducted together with Associate Professor Martin Löfgren, the vice head of department - Karlstad Business School.

Professor Gruber was the opponent for Mr Kotaiba Aal’s “Mellanlägesseminarium”, which is an intermediate PhD Review to be held after the second year of the 4 years programme. Mr Aal’s PhD focuses on the important area of transformative research, which is one of Professor Gruber’s main areas of research. The title of Mr Aal’s dissertation is “Service Ecosystem Transformation Implications for Service Innovation and Transformative Service Research”. It is an articles-based dissertation including the multi-award winning article “Cocreating the Arab Spring: Understanding Transformation of Service Systems in Contention”, published last year in the prestigious Journal of Service Research.

Mr Aal successfully passed the review and the well-attended seminar included Mr Kotaiba’s supervisors (Professor Bo Edvardsson, Professor Bård Tronvoll and Professor Per Skålén), several CTF members of staff and PhD students, and leading authorities such as Professor Stve Vargo (University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA) and Professor Javier Reynoso (EGADE Business School Monterrey, Mexico).

Professor Gruber also attended CTF’s 30^th Anniversary Event. The all-day event was a great success, with several hundred attendees, and included presentations by researchers and experts from academia, industry and public administration.

CSM would like to use this opportunity to officially congratulate CTF on this extraordinary achievement and is looking forward to continue the fruitful collaboration with Europe’s leading service research centre!