Seeking collaboration gaps and potentials through service design

Abstract

In order to continue to keep up with the pace of development within the educational field, Aalto University recognised the need for a strategy that can be elaborated and adjusted. This led to formation of Aalto living strategy 3.0.

In 2018, Aalto, along with its community and stakeholders, started working on a new living strategy that would come into effect from 2021. This thesis experiments with the role of service design as an approach to resolve obstacles in the implementation of the aforementioned strategy. An opportunity for me to experiment with my design learnings in a real-life project with Aalto University and exploring the value of service design, is what motivated me to take up this project. Through this project, I wanted to understand the institutional structure in detail, and experiment with my design learnings so far.

To realise the goals, the thesis focuses on one of the several phases of strategy implementation using qualitative research methods in order to gain insights into the underlying intentions of the strategy. The data was mainly collected as follows: semi-structured interviews, service blueprinting in order to conduct focus group discussions, expert interviews, and observations in meetings.

This thesis highlights the gaps in stakeholder engagement and transparency amongst the departments. These are due to omnipresent silos amongst the departments, and rigid hierarchical structures amongst the stakeholders. The study reveals how collaboration is influenced by stakeholder participation. It also identifies students as one of the key stakeholder groups who can facilitate strategy implementation, providing a mechanism for including their perspectives. The study concludes with providing recommendations for an example proposal, consisting of: (1) analysing and visualizing one of the phases of the implementation process, which includes studying the hierarchies in the process, and identifying new stakeholder roles; (2) recommendations in the form physical and web-based scenarios; and (3) identifying a set of design drivers guiding the implementation of the living strategy

The thesis experiments with the role of service design as an approach in implementing Aalto’s living strategy 3.0. This is achieved by tapping into collaborative aspects amongst the different departments, and, hence, promoting a transparent, all-inclusive, and non-linear approach in the strategy implementation process.