The demand for a more sustainable services and products has encouraged us to explore possibilities to design new products and services. Products and services that, not only during the production phase but also throughout the whole life-cycle, are as energy-saving and resource-efficient as possible.
A variety of concepts and terms have been proposed referring to this type of offering or business in a broad sense such as total care product, functional sales, hybrid offering, integrated solution and service/product engineering, in addition to the product service system. The Products Services Innovation (PSI) team prefer to use the term Integrated Product Service Engineering (IPSE) in order to emphasize the integration aspect.
The PSI team develops world-leading scientific knowledge regarding life-cycle based offerings and business models as target objects, as well as design and innovation as target activities. The offerings include physical products and services, and the design is based on a holistic perspective including environmental and economic consideration. We tackle problems with a multidisciplinary approach using our expertise in engineering design and environmental issues.
We have studied the environmental and economic benefits of the IPSE from a life-cycle perspective in for example physical product such as core plugs for paper mills and services - cleaning of building exteriors or compacting soil. In all three cases it was found that the IPSE improves both the environmental and economic aspects compared with the traditional offering. The results from these cases showed that the IPSE is preferable in comparison with traditional product sales approaches.
Collaboration with industry and academia
Our ambition is to be the first-choice partner by industry and academia and a leading diffuser of knowledge to the industry as well as a generator of top-of-the-line graduated students. We retain strong collaborative relationships with the surrounding society, especially with industry partners.
