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Tutkimus-, kehitys- ja innovaatiotoiminnan sydämessä

Avainsana: innovations

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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Focusing on Innovators instead of Innovations
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21.3.2023
Pamela Spokes

Many organisations are focused on innovation. For these organisations, it can mean being considered thought-leaders, lead to new market share, or even new markets altogether. It can also mean disrupting their own, or even other industries. It generally takes a lot of dedication, effort, and budget to become innovators in an industry. But being innovative does not only mean expensive and complicated outlays. Merriam Webster dictionary defines innovation as “a new idea, method, or device”. In everyday discussion, innovation can mean a wide variety of things. Innovation doesn’t need to be entirely new; just new in that context. Airbnb did not invent renting a room for a night, they just applied it to private residences. Uber did not invent driving people around for money, they just applied in to privately owned cars. And yet, Airbnb and Uber were considered innovative. Accidental Innovation? There is a belief that most innovation is an accidental discovery or serendipity. But this is more likely to be the exception rather than the norm. The work of Thomas Edison is a great example of the hard work that it can take to create an innovation. His innovation came at the expense of countless hours, days, months of doing experiments. From this work he was able to gather a lot of knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work for future inventions. “I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work” - Thomas Edison (1). Thomas Edison was someone we would consider an innovator. Partly because of his vision and his expertise and partly because he had the mindset that is necessary for innovation. His curiosity and his tolerance to failure among others. He did not interpret an unsuccessful experiment as a failure, it was just more knowledge gathering. This is the kind of mindset that workforces need now and into the future to be more effective in their jobs. Especially with the challenges that we all have ahead of us. The outcome of innovation requires that the competence of innovation is nurtured in the entire workforce. We need to purposefully teach people how to use innovative methods and innovative thinking to apply to their own contexts on a much more ubiquitous scale. Before we can concentrate on facilitating innovations, we need to create more Innovators. We need to give people the skills to view their surroundings differently and see opportunities to apply innovative methods to achieve new outcomes. The Value of Innovation Hubs During the past decade many organisations decided to create Innovation Hubs or Innovation Labs. These were able to put a spotlight on the importance of innovation but has it done much for actual innovation? Often it is left to those who are seen as "naturally innovative" to create ideas and concepts to take forward. This means that organisations create these special spaces where it is acceptable to suspend operations as usual to experiment. But it may also mean, that only those who are given permission to go there or those who know about the space and what it does, can be innovative in their work. This exclusivity is detrimental to using innovative methods throughout the organisation. This isn’t to say that everyone should be suspending normal operations, but it does mean that people should be able to learn these methods and see how they can best put them into practice in their own work. Developing Employees' Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship skills, whether utilised in their own business or their workplace are important for everyone. When an organisation invests in developing the entrepreneurial mindset in their employees, they are investing in such skills as creativity, resilience, experimentation, teamwork, problem-solving, being pro-active, tolerance to failure, and many more important skills. These are all necessary for innovation. Having employees that feel empowered enough to solve problems through creativity and to understand how the outcome is important to the organisation will bring work satisfaction and a more innovative way of doing things. The University Ecosystem If you think about universities, there are three main groups of people: teachers, students, and administrative staff. This is an accurate description of most levels of education. The smooth running of an institution requires all three to be successful in their roles. But often the main focus remains on academic staff and students with administrative staff often forgotten about or unintentionally left out. In many institutions there are ample opportunities for academic staff and for students to learn new skills including those skills required in innovation. On the other hand, administrative staff can be left out of these kinds of professional development opportunities with a preference focusing on Excel skills or project management certifications. So, what would happen if we upskilled administrative staff and developed their innovation competence to become innovators in their work? We don’t really know, because it hasn’t been tried yet. Administrative staff develop and deliver most of the services that are used in any given institution. Skills in facilitation and in service design seem to be a natural fit for this segment of the university ecosystem. Developing more innovators will help to create lasting value for the whole ecosystem. It will also make the employees themselves happier in their work as they can see the impact their creativity and innovation skills first hand. The Innovator’s School In response to this need to develop innovators within the administrative staff, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences is piloting an innovator’s School. It will provide internal training opportunities for staff members, that will begin by focusing on service design and facilitation skills. 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. Reference The quote by Thomas Edison (oxfordreference.com)

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Embedding Service Design in Higher Education
22.2.2022
Pamela Spokes

Shortly, service design is a method of purposefully designing services through a set process that emphasises co-creation through deep customer research, prototyping, and testing. It is an iterative process that puts the user(s) at the centre at each stage of the process. This is a shift in not only mindset but procedure of how an organisation works. So how does an organisation begin to shift how it designs services and solves problems. In order for service design to really help an organisation, it must be embedded which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means “functioning as part of a larger device rather than as an independent unit or system”. That means that there must be a shared understanding, language, and ability throughout the organisation. This allows people and units to come together when they need to tackle challenges. But how do you get this critical mass of people working and talking in the same direction? A core team to start First, an organisation needs to start with a dedicated core team whose job it is to be experts in the process of service design. Ideally, this is more than one service design experts although this is, depending on the size of the organisation, where many start. The core team’s role is to disseminate through facilitating, training, and consulting about service design t22ls and processes throughout the organisation. This does not mean that this core group of people will be “service designing” or participating in the content of the work. This means that when a challenge arises, they can either help by facilitating the process or to advise on how the process should look. This is a guiding role and those people who are involved in the content of the problem, would lead and work through the service challenge using the tools, methods, and expertise available. Discover who the champions are After the core team is in place, their role, in addition to facilitating, training, and consulting, is to look for champions. Within any organisation there will be people here and there that have an understanding and an interest in service design and human-centered design. Many times, higher education institutions are big and unwieldy organisations. This can lead to people feeling alone or unable to pursue meaningful change through these methods alone. Part of the role of the core team is to identify people throughout the organisation that are interested to understand more and to practice the method more in their everyday work. Once you start looking, it will probably be a surprise as to how many and where you find them! Training is the key Training throughout the organisation is also a key feature of embedding service design. There is a need for service design capacity building within all organisations and within all units. What would this look like? It would be internal training on how to use service design to move challenges forward. It would show how to do customer/user research in a more qualitative way, as well as how to properly ideate, prototype, and test various solutions. The aim is to have a critical mass of employees understand the process involved in problem-solving with service design. This means that no matter where the problem lies, there is the interest and understanding of how to move from point A to point B then to point C, etc. Where different people can come together from different areas to work on one project using the same, familiar, process. Bespoke project groups The situation of having a core team, champions, and wider training allows project groups to come together and understand how to work together to solve problems. Each problem will require a distinct group of people to gather – a bespoke approach. But once you have built the capacity of enough people in the organisation to work in a similar way, it will not matter who is needed for the project as they will all be using the same method to move forward. The appropriate tools to be chosen by the group on an ad hoc basis. These bespoke teams for projects are exactly the kind of flexibility that will make an organisation more efficient and, ultimately, more successful. Simple but not easy The process set out above is fairly simple in its structure but this does not mean that it is an easy task at all. What we are talking about is wide organisational change. A change that requires a shift in many parts of a complex structure. But it is also worth it. Using user-centred methods and common processes while including more people in the process, helps everyone to work in an understandable way. It also makes a complex organisation a better place to work by being more flexible and proactive with changes. But most importantly, it allows organisation to be more impactful for both the staff and the students. One example of deep change that would need to take place is that of how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are created. Currently, in most organisations in the world, KPIs are set for individuals or units. But this can lead to conflicting outcomes between teams and even colleagues. Whereby one team meeting their KPIs actually leads to another team not meeting theirs or making it difficult to meet theirs. This is because many services are not bound by team boundaries. Usually, many teams are involved in the lifecycle of a service. If you use, as an example, a student starting to study at a higher education institution, that person (even before arriving on campus) touches many different services – marketing, admissions, teaching, etc. So, some of this change would include creating KPIs that go across units rather than within one unit. Embedding service design methods and mindset is necessary in the pursuit of excellence in service provision in higher education institutions and other organisations alike. 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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