There are three PhD-student positions available at CIT, application deadline September 1st 2011. Read the announcement here.

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The Centre for Innovation in Services (CIS) has the following aims:

1. To develop a PhD programme in the field of public and private service innovation.
2. To develop research programmes and to provide research projects within this field.
3. To participate in international networks in this area.
4. To distribute knowledge through instruction about innovations in both the private and public sectors.
5. To assist regional actors by imparting experiences and knowledge on innovative work, and also to assist with the evaluation and documentation of innovative processes.

The CIS defines innovation as either the process of introducing new ideas into practice or the transmitting of already known ideas to a new context. Innovations may be radical in the sense that they involve something completely new and entail a break with current practices, but they can also be incremental in that they involve small changes in the same established practices.

The CIS focuses on to three main areas:

Innovations within public-sector services
In this area we focus on process innovations, organizational innovations as well as product innovations. A central empirical field is the welfare sector, where there have been major organizational innovations over the past few years. Innovative behaviour in the municipal sector is part of this focus.

Innovation in private-sector services
Lillehammer University College (LUC) has a strategic research programme on innovation in the field of tourism industry. This is a main activity that is currently engaging several researchers and doctoral students. Other research fields include services within the energy markets, and comparative studies of innovations through the international Community Innovation Survey.

Public – private collaboration and coproduction
There are blurred boundaries between the public and private sector with respect to service production, and collaborations and partnerships are common. This is central to the research at CIS. Research is also conducted on the public sector as an instigator and regulator of private-sector innovations.

The Director of the centre is: Professor Anne Marie Berg. In addition the leadership is constituted by: Professor Rolf Rønning, Professor Mehmet Mehmetoglu, and Associate Professor Martin Rønningen.

Professor Charles Edquist, CIRCLE, The Universitety of Lund, Sweden, and Associate Professor, Dr. phil. Lars Fuglsang, Roskilde University, Denmark, are also engaged at CIS in part-time positions. The list of staff associated with CIS and list of doctoral students are to be found in the menu to the left.