Service Science Learning: Exploring the Challenge of Cross Disciplinary and Academia–Company Collaboration

Abstract

Several authors have claimed that there is an increasing demand for multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work in service science, management and innovation. Especially in the service area there is a need to break down the barriers between disciplines. At the same time here is evidence that joint multidisciplinary work by authors in academic journals is only increasing marginally. Another weakness is the lack of real academia-company interaction. Service sector companies have accumulated significant experiential knowledge base and tacit insight from their engagements with many real life applications and successes, but these have often not been studied by academicians for abstraction and understanding of principles. This calls for more study as well. As academia cannot bridge the gap alone with their traditional curricula, there is a most important role for new learning approaches incorporating cross disciplinary and academia-company learning at the group level. In this case, bringing the group approach to learning means contributions from a wide area of disciplines and participation from academia as well as from companies. Problem based learning (PBL) seems to be an approach that provides the necessary structure for systematic goal oriented collaboration while encouraging new paradigms to emerge.