Digital Innovation

Innovation and economic experts call for more intensive efforts to increase the number of innovative outcomes, and universities have a significant role to play in this effort. Universities combine theory with practice, they also set standards of future work practices, thereby educators need up-to-date, reliable information to develop modern course curricula.

Thus, the aim of the Digital Innovation Project is to gain a better understanding of how small service companies currently undertake new product development so that we can improve how innovation in services is taught by supporting educators in developing up-to-date courses on Innovation Management.

Additionally, the project supports Higher Education providers to integrate effective digital skills education into service innovation education by providing open-source, high-quality educational resources for use within Higher Education Institutions.

Cooperation of six partners

Digital Innovation Project is funded through the European Commission’s Strategic Alliance programme and is executed by the 6 partners in the European Union. Together, we have been working on the Digital Innovation Project to provide digital innovation benchmarking tools and problem-based learning open educational resources.

Objectives & Methods

Universities combine theory with practice, they also set standards of future work practices, therefore lecturers need up-to-date, reliable information to develop modern course curricula. Thus, the objective of the Digital Innovation Project is to gain a better understanding of how small service companies currently undertake new product development so that we can improve how innovation in services is taught. In order to achieve this, we produce three principle results in the form of our project outputs.

Intellectual Output 1:

Digital Innovation Audit is a state-of-the-art review on new service development processes by micro service businesses and SMEs, this research will be the cornerstone for all of the following outputs.

Intellectual Output 2:

Digital Innovation Benchmarking Tool is an innovative, online interactive self-assessment tool for Service SMEs to identify and benchmark their current digitisation levels. This powerful tool will help businesses to create a benchmark of their current usage of digital tools in the new product development process. The aggregated data from the tool will be particularly interesting and useful for academics as it will build a longitudinal picture of the increasing (or decreasing) digitization within small service businesses.

Intellectual Output 3:

Problem Based Learning (PBL) Open Educational Resources will provide flexible PBL resources to be used in-class with students, showing how digital tools can be better used in the service development process, leading to more and better service innovation.

Partners

• Uniwersytet Szczecinski, Poland
• Fachhochschule Münster - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Stichting Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Momentum Marketing Services Limited, Ireland
• EUCEN, Belgium
• European E-learning Institute, Denmark

PUBLICATIONS

Helmer, J., Łobacz, K., Kör, B., & Wakkee, I. (2021). Innovating digitally for services: A review of innovation process literature focused on digital innovation and service innovation. Procedia Computer Science, 192, 2797-2806.

Website

https://www.innovatingdigitally.eu/