Abstract

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) rarely apply the methods of service design in developing their businesses. In part; this arises from the shortage of available service design expertise. Universities of applied sciences (UASs) have acknowledged the need for service design education; but do not yet have enough experience and practical knowledge to include the studies into curricula.

The PALI project (Competitive Advantage through Service Design) facilitates co-learning of service design amongst UASs. The project is a collaborative effort of HUMAK; Novia; Oulu and Savonia UASs; which form an interdisciplinary environment with several educational fields; tourism; cultural management; design and business administration. Co-learning in the project is based on real-world service development cases implemented in co-creation teams of UAS staff; UAS students and SME representatives.

This paper looks at how the co-learning environment has been constructed throughout the project. The most crucial question turned out to be knowledge transfer; which has been based on an iterative cycle consisting of three phases; progressing; learning by doing and reflecting. The challenge of integrating teaching and research has been addressed by creating a Broker model in which each UAS has a service design expert acting as a project generator between the UAS and SMEs.

Keywords

Service design; case study; learning; knowledge transfer; interdisciplinary

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Co-Learning Service Design within the PALI Project

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) rarely apply the methods of service design in developing their businesses. In part; this arises from the shortage of available service design expertise. Universities of applied sciences (UASs) have acknowledged the need for service design education; but do not yet have enough experience and practical knowledge to include the studies into curricula.

The PALI project (Competitive Advantage through Service Design) facilitates co-learning of service design amongst UASs. The project is a collaborative effort of HUMAK; Novia; Oulu and Savonia UASs; which form an interdisciplinary environment with several educational fields; tourism; cultural management; design and business administration. Co-learning in the project is based on real-world service development cases implemented in co-creation teams of UAS staff; UAS students and SME representatives.

This paper looks at how the co-learning environment has been constructed throughout the project. The most crucial question turned out to be knowledge transfer; which has been based on an iterative cycle consisting of three phases; progressing; learning by doing and reflecting. The challenge of integrating teaching and research has been addressed by creating a Broker model in which each UAS has a service design expert acting as a project generator between the UAS and SMEs.