PRACTICES AND PLATFORMS FOR ALIGNING HIGHER EDUCATION TO THE EUROPEAN TRENDS IN SERVICE INNOVATION

Abstract

Service innovation represents a challenge that has to be supported by specific actions of the higher education professionals. At European level, it was promoted by platforms developed under the Europe INNOVA and other initiatives, and it is now an important priority of the Europe 2020 strategy. Therefore, the academic environment should get aligned to this trend and prepare students for the complex character of the future service systems. This paper presents best practices and platforms to support an action programme for getting aligned to the European trends in service innovation, undertaken within the ESF / POSDRU project INSEED (Strategic Programme for promoting Innovation in Services by Open and Continuous Education). The programme has five main objectives, described here through their specific actions and their applied practices, like comprehending the strategies, programmes and organisms related to the European Commission, or analyzing the knowledge gaps. An important result of this programme is the Service Engineering Master (SEM) from the Automation and Computer Science Faculty, University Politehnica of Bucharest, which is related to other educational programmes on service science from Europe. As support for creating a global educational environment, the paper also presents the INSER@SPACE collaborative platform developed by INSEED, with its three components: (i) a learning management system dedicated to educational courses concerning services; (ii) a semantic wild on service science for creating an international community based on a clearly defined knowledge environment; (iii) educational resources provided as a service, with configurations dedicated to learning new technologies for service innovation.