Why a research programme on Hi-Tech Marketing?

The salient characteristics of high-technology products, services and solutions make marketing and business development more complicated than for more traditional and low-tech goods and services. The high-technology sector is also characterised by a high degree of market, technological and competitive uncertainty. These characteristics imply that marketing activities and business models must be adapted and modified to effectively handle the resulting complex marketing environment. In light of this, high-tech marketers are concerned not only with standard marketing issues such as appropriate segmentation, targeting, and positioning, but also strategic decisions surrounding, e.g., the development of new service-oriented value propositions that attract customers and the establishment of networks of partners that can support such a development. Additionally, since high technology firms are primarily engineering or product-oriented, they exhibit a culture in which engineering knowledge is valued more than marketing acumen. This necessitates the identification and discussion of specific challenges faced by marketers of high technology products, services and solutions.

Research on critical marketing challenges

The HITS programme’s goal is to add to the body of knowledge in marketing by developing and refining theories of industrial and service marketing by taking the particular characteristics of the high-technology sector into consideration. The main research themes of the HITS group are (1) marketing in high technology contexts, (2) marketing of high-technology products and services, and (3) marketing with high-technology products and innovations. Research within the programme is often done ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ organisations to increase knowledge creation and usefulness of results in the studied organisations. The ambition is to collaborate with leading industrial and high-tech companies, working in partnership with them as independent critical scholars on the analysis and solution of concrete practical problems. Based on the research we create new theories and models and also strive to support the development of our partners’ thinking and action in order to improve their competitiveness.

We link academics with practitioners

One successful example of projects within the HITS programme is “Flexible Business models for Sustainable Competitiveness” (“Flexkraft”). This project is funded by a research grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova). The program is run together with MTC (“Marknadstekniskt Centrum”) and Fredrik Nordin is the academic project leader of this project. The project also includes researchers from the universities of Linköping and Karlstad. Corporate Partners include Sandvik Coromant, SKF, Volvo AB, Volvo Construction Equipment, AGA, ABB Robotics and Empower. They provide the empirical foundation and advice on proposals and hypotheses to be tested.