Anna Bengtson

For the last 15 years, I have worked as a teacher and researcher at the department, the last year as professor. My subject area is foremost industrial marketing with a special focus on market dynamics. I teach on both undergraduate and graduate level and I am currently supervising three PhD students.

Anna Bengtson defended her thesis "Framing technological development in a concrete context" in 2003. The thesis focuses on innovation attempts within the construction industry, and more specifically the Swedish reintroduction of timber framing in tall residential buildings in the 1990:ies. Anna has worked as senior lecturer and divided her time between teaching and research ever since 2005. She has been the director of research studies and has been a delegate in the Faculty board. She has also participated in several research projects financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Stiftelsernas forskningsfonder and the Swedish Research Council. She became docent (associate professor) in 2010 and full professor in March of 2019.

In her teaching, Anna has a strong interest for interdisciplinary studies and is engaged in the engineering program STS, where she teaches on three different courses and is part of the program committee. At her own department, she is most known as the examiner for Bachelor and Master theses, and as the head of the examination board. Anna is also part of two evaluation committees for research application at KK-stiftelserna.

Anna´s research builds on a long tradition of Uppsala based business research in industrial marketing. Research on the long term business interactions, and the networks of relationships that result from this interactions, have been studied at the department since the 1960:ies. Anna uses these insights as a base for studies of various aspects of market dynamics. The research is of process character, and deals with questions such as; Why are markets so sticky despite the fact that legal changes may shift the conditions over night? How do other actors in a network, such as suppliers and customers, react when a firm goes into bankruptcy? And, how do innovations affect old and well-established market structures?

One line of research, that clearly pinpoints her interest for market dynamics, deals with the management of large (often mega) projects. In an earlier study, she and colleagues asked themselves, how come some business relationships recur from project to project. Annas is at present taking part in two research studies in this subject area, analyzing the interaction between actors involved in large infrastructural projects. One of the studies aims for a better understanding of how change is stabilized in the project process, whereas the other concerns how value is co-created between involved actors of various kinds (political, business and research organizations) in a science mega project.