Business school innovation through a service science approach: Organizational and performance measurement issues

Abstract

In many cases, there is a serious gap between the needs of real-world organizations and the skills that business school graduates actually develop during their studies. In order to close this gap, innovative pedagogic solutions can be implemented in business schools, such as hands-on, work-group information systems courses; but such changes may imply serious budget and organizational problems, also because of the inertial nature of university institutions. Service science is emerging as a very promising approach to tackle the challenges implied in such practice-oriented, demand-driven innovation of educational services. In this paper, we apply a service science approach to propose a bottom-up re-design of the educational service system in a representative case: the School of Management and Economics of the university of Turin, Italy. We identify the network of stakeholders and propose a model in which students, graduates and firms interested in hiring specialized personnel play an active role in co-creating the value delivered by the university educational services. Finally, we outline the main performance measurement and organizational issues implied by this project.