Value‐added information services for small and medium sized enterprises Available to Purchase

The need for external information is steadily increasing in all kinds of organisations. Large companies have established special information service departments to handle the information searches. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have to turn to commercial information services. However, they are only using information services occasionally because it is often difficult for them to realise the value of the information offered. The raw data available from online databases, for example, needs further processing to become valuable for small industrial companies. Keeping this in mind, the Information Service of the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) has been developing value‐added services tailored especially for industrial SMEs. The main principle in the new service is solving industrial problems by further processing the comprehensive information gathered from various sources. The services are presented as information packages, e.g. Competitor Survey or Product Evaluation. The new services have been directly marketed to segmented clientele and the experiences so far have been promising.