Abstract
Service innovation represents a challenge that has to be supported by specific actions of the higher education professionals. At European level, it was promoted by platforms developed under the Europe INNOVA and other initiatives, and it is now an important priority of the Europe 2020 strategy. Therefore, the academic environment should get aligned to this trend and prepare students for the complex character of the future service systems. This paper presents best practices and platforms to support an action program for getting aligned to the European trends in service innovation, undertaken within the ESF / POSDRU project INSEED (Strategic Program for promoting Innovation in Services by Open and Continuous Education). The program has five main objectives:
A. Aligning university actions to the European strategy;
B. Contributing to the activity of professional organizations and scientific communities at international level;
C. Collaboration with European researchers on the topic of innovative services;
D. Sustaining joint educational programs and curriculum in the domain of services, in correlation with European partners;
E. Using the INSER@SPACE collaborative platform for promoting virtual educational resources and knowledge regarding the service science.
Each objective is described by its specific actions and by a presentation of the applied practices, like: comprehending the strategies, programs and organisms related to the European Commission; analyzing the knowledge gaps; co-authoring articles with experts from European universities with common research interests; organizing scientific events in the domain of services; certifying undergraduate and postgraduate educational programs dedicated to sector services. An important example is the Service Engineering Master (SEM) from the Automation and Computer Science Faculty, University Politehnica of Bucharest, and its relation to other programs on service science, from Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Germany and Czech Republic. The master is linked through a double degree agreement, with the Master in Service Engineering and Management (MESG) from the Faculty of Engineering -FEUP, University of Porto. The two programs complement each other, as SEM is IT-oriented and MESG is business-oriented. The paper compares them, based on their common elements and their particular contributions.
As support for creating a global educational environment, we also present the INSER@SPACE collaborative platform developed by INSEED, with its three components: (i) a learning management system dedicated to educational courses concerning services; (ii) a semantic wiki on service science for creating an international community based on a clearly defined knowledge environment; (iii) educational resources provided as a service, with configurations dedicated to learning new technologies for service innovation. |