Business School Innovation Through a Service Science Approach: Organizational and Performance Measurement Issues

In many cases, there is a serious gap between the needs of real-world organizations and the skills that business school graduates actually develop during their studies. In order to close this gap, innovative pedagogic solutions can be imple-mented in business schools, such as hands-on, work-group information systems courses; but such changes may imply serious budget and organizational problems, also because of the inertial nature of university institutions. Service science is emerging as a very promising approach to tackle the challenges implied in such practice-oriented, demand-driven innovation of educational services. In this paper, we apply a service science approach to propose a bottom-up re-design of the educational service system in a representative case: the School of Management and Economics of the university of Turin, Italy. We identify the network of stakeholders and propose a model in which students, graduates and firms inter-ested in hiring specialized personnel play an active role in co-creating the value delivered by the university educational services. Finally, we outline the main performance measurement and organizational issues implied by this project.