What Makes Academic Service Centers Effective?

Academic service research centers have been positioned as a research partner for service companies. In this article, the authors present a framework for assessing their effectiveness. The results of an empirical study conducted during 2 years suggest that user satisfaction is central to establishing decision maker trust, as well as promoting the use of the information. In both years, quality of content and researcher characteristics were identified as key drivers of satisfaction. In the initial stage of the relationship between the service research center and the client firm, information use is also driven by the political acceptability of the information. It was found that trust had no effect on information use. However, the results of the second year suggest that particularly trust in the researcher becomes a crucial factor as the relationship develops, because it directly affects the use of information by academic service research centers.