Några av er kanske har noterat att det finns ett nytt ansikte i korridoren. Vi är glada över att få ha Tiina Tuominen här på Hanken under ett år. Här får ni en liten introduktion till vad Tiina sysslar med.

Tiina Tuominen

I am a new researcher that has joined the marketing group in the beginning of October. I’d like to introduce myself shortly and tell something about my research – more information will follow later on!

I’m originally from Kirkkonummi and I studied in Helsinki School of Economics (which is currently part of Aalto university), majoring in Organisation and Management. I started my journey as a researcher when I did my Masters’ thesis on a relatively new topic (at that time!), service innovation. It was very interesting since I always learnt something new when approaching it from different theoretical perspectives. I continued studying the topic and currently I have been leading a small and cross-disciplinary research team IRIS (innovation research in services) at Aalto University. We have studied innovations in a variety of contexts, most recently focusing on employee- and user-driven innovations in public sector services and in knowledge-intensive business service firms. We have also created models to support service development in Finnish organisations – check out the latest achievements, palveluntuotteistaminen.fi and inno-vointi.fi!

Despite inspiring research projects, there are moments when one needs to distance oneself from practical work in order to reflect on the data and come up with new ideas. Therefore I was really happy when I got a one-year postdoctoral grant from Nissi foundation: it allowed me to join Hanken’s marketing group and focus on thinking and writing. In addition, my ‘special someone’ lives in Vaasa and I hadn’t succeeded in marketing the Helsinki area favourable for him. So I made a ‘reverse’ migration from Espoo to Vaasa and was delighted with the warm welcome to the marketing group.

During this year, I work with the concept of ‘transformative agency’ in the context of service organisations. It means that I aim to understand what makes certain individuals oriented towards, and capable of, creating useful novelties – individually or collectively – while their colleagues may be satisfied with the current situation. I hope to understand how service organisations could better take into account their members in different types of change situations. I believe that instead of applying the latest and the most fashionable leadership models available, many organisations should start by analysing the unique features of – and interactions between – their employees and customers.

How this could be done is yet to be answered. Therefore, in addition to getting to know the city and hopefully improving my Swedish, I explore these questions in professional service organisations during this winter, and during the next Spring I intend to make similar analyses in public sector cases. So stay tuned for the forthcoming new insights into this topic!

Tiina Tuominen

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