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Tutkimus-, kehitys- ja innovaatiotoiminnan sydämessä

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Connecting Local Businesses to Expertise at Universities of Applied Sciences
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5.9.2024
Pamela Spokes

One of the goals of the Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) functions at Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) is to connect the surrounding society to the outcomes of the work that they undertake. Each year many projects and research are started, continued and completed by UASs throughout Finland that can have a great impact on the surrounding local society. From the institutional perspective, it can be difficult to make the outcomes or relevance of these projects known outside of the institution in a coherent way. But the entire purpose of them is to improve society in some capacity. It is important that companies and organisations know that they can reach out to UAS institutions and figure out if there is anything that would help develop services, products, customer’s experience, or even processes. There are many ways to get connected to work that is happening in your local community. This post aims to list the most common ways that business, organisations, and even individuals with ideas can reach out to UASs to benefit from their research, development and innovation (RDI) work. There are also many different ways to benefit from this work. It can be on an individual level, unit level, or entire organisational level. This will depend on your own preference or capacity. Here are some ways that you or your organisation can connect with the university of applied science in your area (or beyond). Multi-disciplinary Innovation Projects It is becoming more common for institutions to create experiential learning in regards to different aspects of business development. This allows students to work with organisations and businesses to solve real problems. At Metropolia University of Applied Sciences there is MINNO (multi-disciplinary innovation) Projects. These are experiential courses available for all students to take. It is a course that consists of 10 ECTS for the students. But more importantly, it is the ability for organisations to connect with the institution and to bring challenges for a diverse group of students to work on. The MINNO Project was recently lauded by the World Economic Forum as one of their 13 Skills-First Lighthouses. “The Skills-First Lighthouse recognition is given for practical and innovative activities that benefit society and individuals by identifying, strengthening and articulating skills in a work-life context.” This will require your organisation to work together with the students to look for innovative solutions to the real problems you bring. If you want to consider putting your company forward to take part in MINNO, you can find more information about how to do it on the Metropolia website. Accessing Available Courses for Upskilling If there is a need or want to upskill individuals in an organisation, there are many courses available that have been created by the institutions from the work that has been completed in the Research, Development, and Innovation units and other units. These can be taken for free or with a small fee and cover a large range of topics. Most of the courses created by UASs come with academic credits attached but whether these are utilised or not is up to the individual. Metropolia UAS, Haaga-Helia UAS, and Laurea UAS work together under the 3UAS (or 3AMK in Finnish) brand and through this website, it is possible to access the courses that are available. There are courses at almost every institution in Finland. In the future, there will the possibility to also access courses that are given through the U!reka European University partners also. The extent of which will become clearer in the next year or two. While the MINNO project has companies working with groups of students on real business problems, there are many individual courses or even mini-courses that can be taken by anyone. In 2023, Metropolia launched the Service Design Sprint MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) which is available to anyone at anytime. It is free of charge and, if desired, can earn the participant 2 ECTS credits. This course will guide the participant through the process of using service design to solve business problems. It will also show you how it is possible to do this in a rapid and controlled manner. Because this course is available any time and for anyone, it could easily be done in someone’s free time or sponsored by a company with time given to complete the course. Open University For many years, open university courses have been available for anyone to take. This has not changed. In fact, open university courses from different educational institutions are becoming increasingly popular. It is important to note that the ‘open university’ in Finland is not one thing (like it is for example in the UK), each institution has its own version and these must be searched individually on each institution’s own portal. Live Cohort Courses Another way to access knowledge and upskilling opportunities is to join specific offerings through individual projects themselves. The Luovi project is a great example of how individuals and companies or organisations can take part in what is happening in their local UAS. Luovi is a set of trainings and upskilling for individuals working in the creative sector. It covers general working skills but in entrepreneurship, sustainability, digital skills, marketing, and branding. These skills are to support those in the creative sector who need to upskill in these areas. The other benefit of this kind of course is networking. You will get to meet people who are in similar or adjacent fields as yourself and create a community around the skills you learn. This is just one example of this kind of course. Contact the UAS near you to see if there are any courses that you could take part in. Connecting With Classes An additional, yet more informal, way to interact with the UAS expertise is to connect with lecturers of certain classes that are teaching what you are interested in. This can help provide the students with real cases with real organisations. For example, a small company (~6 employees) from the food industry connected with a lecturer in a marketing class to help them to explore some possibilities for market expansion. The company did not have enough staff, expertise, or financial resources to achieve usable results on their own, so they provided the problem to the students and allowed them to work on this real case and provide some real results for the company. Connecting with Collaborative Platforms Metropolia UAS has three innovation hubs which encompass seven collaborative platforms where collaboration is essential. The Hubs cover three thematic areas that are important to the institution: Clean and Sustainable Solutions Smart and Creative City Future Proof Health and Wellbeing Companies or organisations who work in these thematic areas are welcome to contact the Hubs and Collaborative Platforms. More information is available on each of their webpages: Carbon Garage - supports companies with their green transition and bringing sustainability solutions into action. CuWeRe - aims to build a more meaningful cultural wellbeing field in Finland and beyond. Garage - includes the Robo Garage and the AIoT Garage where they offer a physical location, resources, and equipment for quick and longer experiments as well as large-scale implementation projects. Helsinki XR Center - is the largest innovation, development and startup center in the Nordics dedicated to Extended Reality (XR) technologies. Metropolia Workshop - (the Koskelo Workshop) is a flexible project workshop for automotive and mechanical engineering research, development and innovation (RDI) projects. Along with students and expert staff, they can implement projects from small-scale testing to larger projects. SmartLab - this smart home platform allows technologies, interfaces, and practices to be tested and developed and can be used to develop user-friendly solutions that serve housing. Urbanfarmlab - consists of show-room and co-working space as well as controlled indoor farming spaces for technical and other pilots including generating new business models, indoor farming technologies and solutions. There are many different opportunities to collaborate with your local Universities of Applied Sciences as business owners or organisations. You can do small projects, individual professional development, and even larger business and product or service development projects. The first step is to determine what is the scope of the development you are wanting or willing to commit to. Then to search through the University of Applied Sciences website that you want to work with to see what options might be available. There will always be someone on the other end that will help to find the right people to collaborate with. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences.

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Be the Guide, Not the Hero
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20.6.2023
Pamela Spokes

Workshop facilitation is a skill that many organisations still do not realise that they need on a wider basis. Facilitated workshops are able to achieve many things that unguided meetings are unable to. This comes from their structure, their pace, their methods to hear difference voices, and having a person whose job it is to keep everyone on track. ‘Be the guide and not the hero’ is a good mantra for all facilitators out there. It is something that may need repeating when you are in the middle of a difficult workshop where some may be looking to the facilitator for answers. What Is Facilitation? The word facilitate is a verb that comes from the 1610s and is descended from French and Latin - "make easy, render less difficult," from French faciliter "to render easy," from stem of Latin facilis "easy to do."[1] The Cambridge Dictionary defines the noun facilitation as “the act of helping other people to deal with a process or reach an agreement or solution without getting directly involved in the process, discussion etc. yourself.” [2] This means that a facilitator is not usually a part of the team and may not even be a part of your organisation. The role of the facilitator is to guide participants through the process to achieve an outcome in the allocated time. It is the facilitators job to make sure that the discussion does not stray too far from the topic at hand and that organisational politics are kept to a minimum. The focus is on the process and the outcome. In other words, facilitation helps groups get things done. Many meetings in organisation are broken. There are many reasons for this. They can be hijacked by the loudest voices or those who are better at office politics than others. There are 4 main issues where a facilitator can help solve: Poor collaboration Unproductive meetings that waste time Companies not getting the best out of their expert employees People lacking ownership over solutions Helping With Objectivity Objectivity is one of the crucial pieces of being a good facilitator and it is something that you always strive for. It is through this objectivity that you are able to help manage the heat, the feelings, the politics, and all the other things that happen when decisions are being made and budgets needing to be allocated or spent. With this objectivity, facilitators help in the four main ways. Collaboration is Broken Alludo’s The State of Collaboration Report 2022 [3] had some very interesting results. It mirrors the sentiments that you can hear around the world when it comes to meetings. It gave 3 statistics that reflect how employees are currently feeling about their work: 70% of employees agree that poor collaboration is limiting their productivity and wasting their time 64% of employees report that they waste a minimum of three hours per week 20% wasting as many as six hours weekly [4] The responsibility for these statistics come down to leadership. 78% reported that their organisation’s leadership for “not doing enough to promote collaboration within the organisation”. This includes not investing or providing the right tools or in training of collaboration tools. Facilitators, in essence, are collaboration tools. Unproductive meetings that waste time Meetings are almost universally disliked and they are also high on the list of things people wish would change in their organisation’s culture. Traditional meetings, while they are suitable for some kinds of actions, are rarely successful in creating an atmosphere that feels productive, collaborative, and effective. Many meetings end with planning the next meeting- either to deal with the things that did not get resolved today or for new issues that came up while trying to discuss something else. Traditional meetings are rarely successful in creating an atmosphere that feels productive, collaborative, and effective. This cycle ends up with people going to meeting after meeting rather than actually being able to do their jobs. Having a facilitator when a decision needs to be made can be really important to a successful outcome. Companies are not getting the best out of their employees Organisations hire experts to add value. Adding value requires getting the best out of their expertise. Just because someone is an expert in one thing does not mean that they are experts in collaboration or in how to share their knowledge effectively with others. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out how to bring experts together and know how to get these experts to work together in a way that they understand each other. People lack ownership over solutions When people don’t feel heard, they step back from the outcome. During a properly facilitated workshop, each participant will have the chance to have their voice heard just as much as anyone else. They will also participate equally in the decisions that are made along the way. One of the reasons that it is important that the facilitator be the guide and not the hero (the one that comes up with the best idea) is because at the end of it, the participants must own the outcome and be willing to do the work that will be needed to bring it to reality. Facilitation Is a Top Future Skill Facilitation does not only help organisations to work better, when learned, facilitation skills help individuals to future-proof their own skillset. According to the 2020 report by The World Economic Forum [5], the top skills employers will prioritize these 10 skills. The last 5 on this list are all practiced and exercised when using facilitation. Leadership and social Active learning and learning strategies Technology design and programming Resilience, stress tolerance Technology use, monitor and control Analytical thinking and innovation Complex problem solving Critical thinking and analysis Creativity, originality and initiative Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation Facilitation helps to give structure to all of these 5 points that helps individuals and organisations accomplish more than they would without it. Being able to give structure to things such as complex problems, innovation, creativity, problem-solving, and ideation is a valuable skill to have. Being the guide and not the hero is emblematic of providing the structure rather than being the content expert. It is the glue that holds the experts together so that they can do their job and actually solve the problems and creating intelligent and innovative solutions. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences. Sources [1] Etymonline.com [2] Dictionary.cambridge.org [3] Alludo.com [4] Blog.alludo.com [5] Weforum.org

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