Designing business support for the service economy

Higher education, and the role of universities in society, is changing. Although teaching and traditional research are still the primary mission’s of most universities, there is an increasing emphasis (from inside and outside the institution) on ensuring that universities build relationships and create value in so called ‘third stream’ activities - consulting, advisory, commercial research and other initiatives in partnership with third party organisations.

Traditionally, universities have done much of this work with high technology or engineering focussed companies and organisations. Birmingham City University realised that this model doesn’t fit with today’s market, in which many companies compete on factors such as service quality and customer experience. They also realised that this model doesn’t fit well with their design and social sciences focused offer.

Academics get down to business

Initially, we helped Birmingham City University run a series of service and customer experience focused workshops with groups of academics and key business leaders from the Midlands, where we explored the types of service design and customer experience services the University could (and should) provide.

This proved very successful, and Engine worked closely with a core team from Birmingham City University’s Corporate Development Centre (CDC) to assist with a 3million pound bid to HEFCE for funds to trial an experimental new business support service called Service by Design.

The bid was successful and Engine was then engaged to design and develop the service. The first step was to conduct a series of roundtable workshops with the CDC to understand exactly what they wanted to get from the project. We then broadened our consultation to examine on further detail what the academics and client organisations needed. From this we created a service blueprint to describe how the various people, touchpoints and other components of the service would work together.

Developing the service blueprint

We continued to work closely with the CDC team to develop the central component of the new consulting offer - A simple four step design process that puts the customer experience at the heart (and the start) of the client engagement.

Rather than trying to push a standard subsidised consulting offer (such as IT assistance or training), Service by Design instead looks at the business from the customer’s perspective, and then asks how Birmingham City University’s academics and research centres can help improve what they see.

Development of materials for the programme

Once the building blocks were in place Engine designed and delivered three residential workshops to train over 50 academics to become ‘innovation mentors’ on the Service by Design program. You can keep up with the latest developments on the Service by Design website.