Laurea, Haaga-Helia, and Metropolia Universities of Applied Sciences organized their first joint Professional Summer School (PSS) with a title “Digital Wellbeing Co-creation and Start-up Summer School 2016” on Leppävaara campus on April 30 -- June 10, 2016. The main idea was to gather multidisciplinary groups of students from each institute and their partner institutes for a two-week long service innovation seeking intensive course, provide them with real business problems from partner companies to solve, and to provide the students with modern tools and methods for co-creation and service design.
This event was initiated by the presidents of the universities as a part of enhancing co-operation between these three universities of applied sciences operating on the Helsinki metropolitan area in southern Finland. The institutions have begun developing measures to promote student mobility and entrepreneurship education and help create easy-access programmes for innovation between higher education institutions and SMEs in the Helsinki metropolitan area.
In addition, there are collaboration efforts aimed at leveraging global funding channels for research and other projects more efficiently than before and creating Finland's largest cluster for education exports in the UAS sector. The Professional Summer School is one of the seven development projects under way.
The partnership draws from each institution's unique educational profile and identity. The Helsinki metropolitan area needs higher education institutions with distinctive profiles that respond to the region's skills needs, both on bachelor’s and master’s degree level. To this end, the institutions are focusing on a strategic partnership that will benefit both students and employers.
This paper gives a brief introduction to how co-creation and service design were used as a learning environment, describes the results from the PSS 2016, and discusses about future development of the concept.
Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017