Digital Innovation Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Innovation

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

CONTEXT:

From retail to real estate, transport to tourism, services provide 150 million EU jobs (68% of total employment) and their role in driving smart, sustainable and inclusive growth is undisputed. It has long been a concern that service firms are less innovative than manufacturing industries but fortunately, the landscape is changing and today companies have unprecedented opportunities to implement radical innovations based on transformative technology and knowledge capabilities.

Unfortunately, however, very few small firms are making use of this digital innovation capacity. Polish executives at the recent World Economic Forum highlighted low, firm-level technology absorption as a key area of opportunity in Polish service companies and the Innovativeness of Polish economy is still very low, in fact Poland is fourth last on the European Innovation Scoreboard! The share of innovative enterprises in Poland in 2015-2017 was only 10.4% in SERVICES and most worryingly this is less than in 2014-2016. Thus, innovation and economic experts call for more intensive efforts to increase the number of entities implementing new or significantly improved products and business processes and we as Universities have a significant role to play in this effort.

OBJECTIVES & ACTIVITIES
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 DI is clear: 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 will:

1. Support HE Educators in DEVELOPING improved & up-to-date courses on Innovation Management by:
– researching the current state of new service development practices based on the recent theories on innovation process (IO1 Digital Innovation Audit)
– providing an analysis of the range of available digital tools which support innovation, and mapping these to the different innovation processes (IO1)
– providing a real time analysis of the actual usage by service companies of digital tools in their new service development practices (IO2 Digital Innovation Benchmarking Tool)
2. Support HE Educators in IMPLEMENTING better and more up-to-date courses on Innovation Management by:
– providing flexible Problem-Based Learning OERs (IO3) 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

PARTICIPANTS
The TARGET GROUP will be two-fold, in order to effect change and create impact within businesses we must begin with those who provide the educational training:
Direct:
– HE educators delivering courses on innovation management at different levels (bachelor, master, after diploma)
Indirect:
– HE students enrolled in innovation management courses
– Service SMEs who employ students and train workers

RESULTS
We will produce 3 principle results in the form of our project Outputs:

IO1 Digital Innovation Audit will be a state-of-the-art review on new service development processes by micro service businesses and SMEs, this research will be the corner stone for all of the follow outputs
IO2: Digital Innovation Benchmarking Tool – an innovative, online interactive self-assessment tool for Service SMEs to identify and benchmark their current digitisation levels. This simple, yet 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.
IO3: Problem Based Learning Open Educational Resources, these will engage a critical thinking and problem-solving approach to teaching Digital Innovation for service sector SMEs. Students will be encouraged to use existing resources on innovative digital skills as a starting point in choosing the applicable/appropriate tools which they will utilize in their PBL solutions.

IMPACT
On completion, the project will have made it possible for HE providers to integrate effective digital skills education into service innovation education. By providing open source, high quality educational resources for use within HEIs we hope to empower educators to become agents for change. This will have the impact of providing the service sector with highly skilled graduates, competitive in the labour market and bringing huge benefits to the businesses which they are employed within. By digitizing new service development within service sector businesses, we hope to ensure that EU businesses stay competitive and up to date within the global market.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 269959 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIWERSYTET SZCZECINSKI & Country: PL

Project Partners

• EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES CONTINUING EDUCATION NETWORK
• STICHTING HOGESCHOOL VAN AMSTERDAM
• MOMENTUM MARKETING SERVICES LIMITED
• FACHHOCHSCHULE MUNSTER
• European E-learning Institute