This article argues that service design education is not merely a beneficial addition to higher education curricula but a core competence for navigating the complexities of modern, service-driven economies. Service design can no longer be considered a niche discipline reserved for innovation departments, creative industries, or the like. It is a vital core competence for the 21st-century workforce with its emphasis on skills that address ever-evolving human needs in both the private and public sector, and beyond. As societies confront complex challenges and rapidly changing user needs, the human-centred, collaborative, and iterative approaches that underpin service design provide a powerful framework for innovation, resilience, and responsiveness. How we do this at scale is a question also addressed in this article.
The Finnish higher education context
To understand this article a little context regarding the Finnish higher education system is needed. For the most part, the Finnish higher education sector is split into two pathways: universities and universities of Applied Sciences. Where universities focus on research universities of applied sciences focus on teaching and direct societal impact. In total, there are 35 public higher education institutions, of which 13 are universities and 22 are universities of applied sciences.
Finland has become well-known for the importance it places on quality education. In recent years, the Finnish higher education sector has begun to adapt to shifting learner profiles. The OECD report Expanding and steering capacity in Finnish higher education – Thematic policy brief states that Finland has chosen to raise the research and innovation capacities of the universities of applied science, and to widen opportunities for collaboration in education and research between research and applied science universities (2022, 4). One of the aims of Finland’s Vision for Higher education and Research in 2030 focuses specifically on research and innovation communities. It also stresses that higher education institutions’ contribution to skills development and demand-driven innovation is vital (Finnish Government 2019).
The growing importance of service design education
Service design has formally been around in the academic context in Finland since Laurea University of Applied Sciences launched the first academic degree programme in 2009. This MBA in Service Innovation & Design was the first of its kind in the world and is still offered today. While this first of its kind degree programme is highly significant, the use of service design in higher education did not start with this degree. The early adopters of service design were already having meetings in the early 2000s in Finland, and the first master’s degree that included service design was completed by Mikko Koivisto in 2007 and Satu Miettinen’s doctoral dissertation was completed in the same year at the same institution, Helsinki University of Art and Design (now part of Aalto University).
The research that underpins service design was already underway with pivotal works in the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s resulting in services marketing research and writing by Professors Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2004), Professors Robert Lusch and Stephen Vargo (2004, 2006), Professor Christian Grönroos (2007, 2008a, 2008b), Professor Evert Gummesson (2008), and more.
As developed economies continue to evolve, services now account for the vast majority of economic activity—upwards of 80% in many cases (World Trade Organization 2019). This structural shift means that the ability to design and deliver purposeful, effective services is no longer a niche skill, but a core competence needed across professions and sectors, from healthcare and education to business and government. Finland, like other advanced economies, reflects this service dominant reality.
Finland stands out for how pro-actively it has responded to this reality. Service design education is not only widely available across Finnish higher education, but they are in the process of embedding it and various innovation methodologies in various disciplines and levels of education. This commitment to innovation is reflected in Finland’s consistent ranking among the top countries globally for innovation. The proactive approach is demonstrated in Finland’s global standings— ranking 7th on the Global Innovation Index (WIPO 2024) and 4th amongst European countries (European Commission 2024). Finland’s educational foresight to invest more time and effort into developing both innovation and service design education into higher education is easily seen when examining the current landscape of degree programmes in Finland.
Why service design matters in modern higher education
The StudyInfo (Opintopolku) portal in Finland is where you go to see all the different higher education study options one has in Finland. In 2023 there were 33 degree programmes that included or were wholly focused on service design (Spokes 2024). If you look for the same in Canada for example, there are zero. If you try the United States, the State of Service Design in the United States Report 2023, with almost 4,000 higher education institutions, listed only one specific degree programme that is dedicated wholly to service design (Frog 2022).
When I conducted the research interviews for the State of Service Design in Finland 2023 report (Spokes 2024), the interviews with service design educators noted that there is now an overall recognition of service design in most degree programmes and that classes of service design are being added to a vast array of degree programmes that are not directly related to service design.
Service design, in my view, consists of three core elements (see image). First, it is fundamentally a mindset that is rooted in human-centred design. This requires individuals to approach challenges with a particular way of thinking—one that is empathetic, curious, and focused on the real needs of people. Second, it is based on the design thinking process. While this process is often presented as a linear sequence of actions, in practice it is iterative and non-linear; those using service design may revisit earlier stages to stay aligned with user needs or to refine their direction. Adopting the mindset is vital to practitioners to remain comfortable with this ambiguity. Third, service design uses a toolkit that often borrows from other disciplines. These tools are adapted to support gathering data, problem-framing, ideation, prototyping, and testing.
Together, these three elements of mindset, process, and tools, create a foundation for openness, adaptability, and commitment to solving the right problem, not just the most visible or immediate problem. Crucially, service design centres on the user and their context, ensuring that the problem being addressed is real and does not just reflect the organisation’s will. This represents a significant shift from traditional approaches to problem-solving and value creation.
Experience-driven economies
The 1950s saw a shift in dominant logic from good-dominant logic to service-dominant logic. This shift represents the change in mindset of cultural norms and beliefs on how value is created for and in the economy. This shift, explored more by Professors Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch over the past two decades, began for them in 2004 when they proposed that in the new service economy that the value could no longer be contained in the physical output of a business because many times there is not a physical product but an intangible service and that real value is created when the service or product was used resulting in ‘value-in-use’ rather than ‘value-in-exchange’. This means that instead of value being created from the mere manufacturing of goods, the value always has to be co-created by the customer. It is well acknowledged that modern economies are based primarily on services. The 2023 figures from the European Central Bank website put the percentage of the Euro area economic region as 73.1% services based and for the US it is 80.5% (European Central Bank 2023).
This shift in value creation highlights the urgent need for professionals in all industries who can design and deliver meaningful service experiences. Skills that service design education explicitly fosters. With a major part of the economy relying on value-in-use, means that experiences matter a great deal. How a customer interacts with your service is vitally important to the health of your business or organisation.
Fostering essential skills
Authors and service design professionals, Stickdorn et al (2018), identify six principles of service design; these are human-centred, collaborative, iterative, sequential, real, holistic. These principles are not simply theoretical, they inform the essential skills and mindsets needed to design meaningful, functional services. For example, systems thinking is a critical skill, defined by Meadows (2008, 11) as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something”. Recognising that everything is part of something bigger is important to understand how organisations function and, alternatively, malfunction. Seeing the bigger picture allows for more effective service improvements and change-making, revealing that stakeholders often extend far beyond the immediate people we interact with.
In line with these principles, collaboration and co-creation also emerge as foundational: working together and creating together. This is something that is necessary in so many parts of working life and working across organisational units as well. Service design offers people a shared language to talk about achieving outcomes and what is necessary to work together.
When collaboration is intentionally designed across units, the space for innovation expands. A shared approach to creating new services and products not only unlocks creative potential but also increases the chances of meaningful, sustainable adoption. Whether adapting to regulatory changes, responding to climate realities, or meeting evolving user expectations, this holistic view, emphasised by Stickdorn et al. (2018), ensures that organisations are not only responsive but resilient.
Service design as a cross-disciplinary tool
Using service design to unite different disciplines is essential in developing future-ready teamwork and innovation skills. New ideas happen when people from different perspectives come together. Service design offers a practical, learnable approach to support that. It is more than a process or a set of tools; it is a shared language that enables collaboration across sectors and disciplines.
One effective way to develop these skills in students from different disciplines is through jamming: a time-bound, hands-on activity where interdisciplinary teams co-create solutions to real-world challenges using service design methods. Typically lasting one to three days, jams promote rapid prototyping and reflection, aligning closely with experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984).
A strong example is the 10 Days 100 Challenges course, a 10 ECTS course delivered as a collaboration by Metropolia, Haaga-Helia, and Laurea Universities of Applied Sciences. It brings together students from different disciplines and each of these institutions to solve authentic business problems, all while fostering cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives rarely seen in traditional coursework.
This approach reflects a broader strategic emphasis within Finnish higher education on cross-disciplinary, experience-based learning. The broader strategic emphasis means that design thinking and service design are something that should be spread throughout higher education.
Making service design a core competence across disciplines
Professors Gary Holmes and Nick Hooper (2000, 247) define a core competence as “a set of learning outcomes—skills or competencies—which each individual should acquire during or demonstrate at the end of a period of learning.” In the context of service design, these competences include human-centred thinking, strategic decision-making, co-creation and collaboration, prototyping and iterative improvements. These are all essential for meaningful innovation.
These skills enable individuals to understand user needs, make informed decisions, build solutions collaboratively, translate ideas into tangible outputs, and improve them through testing. Crucially, these are not tied to any subject or sector. They are applicable across all industries.
As organisations increasingly strive to meet evolving user expectations, these transferable skills help ensure relevance, responsiveness, and continuous improvement. Embedding service design into education equips students to adapt to any professional context and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration which is an essential capability for solving today’s—and tomorrow’s—complex and interconnected challenges.
Challenges and opportunities
As desirable and necessary as service design education is, there are a few challenges that institutions face when thinking about integrating service design education into the majority of degree programmes. The first being that there is a potential for not having enough faculty with expertise in service design. This can lead to service design being misunderstood or misapplied. It is also difficult to navigate curriculum integration due to the sheer amount of content that is required learning in different specialties.
Some degree programmes, being limited to a certain number of credits, have difficulty finding enough credits to dedicate to all the different topics that should be learned. Then there is also the age-old problem of resistance to new methods. Not everyone believes that new methods are necessary or even desirable. None of these are mutually exclusive and are more likely to be interconnected.
In terms of opportunities, there are a few that may not be obvious from the outside when you are talking about just teaching a new topic to students. Since service design is understood and learned much more easily in the actual practice of it, it can enhance interdisciplinary learning for the subjects where it is integrated. This brings with it the opportunity for lecturers to reach out across disciplines and create something together. For instance, a marketing course might want to partner with a computer science course to apply service design principles to the development of a new mobile application. This collaboration can centre on the needs of users while students who normally do not get to work together, are able to.
Because service design is a mindset, a process, and a set of tools and methods that do not change, it allows the teacher to create opportunities for different subjects to interact and to learn and practice service design together. There is also an opportunity to have service design be learned in real-world applications through what might be called hackathons, service jams, and to a lesser extent, design sprints (Spokes 2021a; 2022a; 2022b).
These kinds of innovation events (Spokes 2021b) give students immediate and undeniable hands-on experience with the mindset, the process, and the tools and methods. And when done well, they are also designed in a way that allows for maximum interdisciplinarity. Participation in these real-world applications will amplify their learning and understanding of how they can use service design in their own industry and subject specialty. It is for this reason that jamming has been integrated as a pedagogical tool into some courses.
Jamming as an example for learning service design
Returning to the opportunities that jamming brings to the higher education environment, it is vital that students are able to work on projects with different disciplines long before they get to the job market. Jamming is a fantastic opportunity to exercise this collaboration muscle before stepping into the workplace where it will be an almost daily occurrence.
Jamming is not done alone in an educational context. It must be complemented with the use of reflection. It is through this practice of action and reflection that students will navigate the experience. While purposefully moving between these processes during a course that incorporates jamming, students are able to learn faster and easier. The jam allows students to take an active role in the learning process and, in turn, this optimises the student’s learning (Smart & Csapo 2007). Three examples of the use of jamming as a pedagogical tool can be found in volume 12 issue 1 of the International Journal of Management and Applied Research. These articles cover the use of jamming in nursing education in Finland (Spokes 2025), in a Design Master’s course in Canada and a PGCert course in Teaching and Learning in the UK (Abegglen, Desire, Gordon, Neuhaus & Sinfield 2025), and in a format that was open to all kinds of learners in the form of EDUJAMs (Newton & Mutton 2025).
The ability for universities to integrate this kind of experiential learning into their curriculum will allow the students to be more prepared for the realities of working life as well as the needs of our experience-based economies in the future. It does not, however, mean that incorporating jamming into curriculum is necessarily easy. There are a few barriers that present themselves at this point: scaling provision, suitable spaces, and strengthening industry collaboration.
When there is no institution that teaches service design in a country, it can be difficult to find the faculty members who are skilled enough to run a course that incorporates jamming or to develop a service design course to teach the basics. It is not impossible, but it is also not immediately possible. To reach the numbers of students that require these skills will take time to build within the institution.
Any kind of service design education requires specific spaces that are designed for collaboration. While traditional classrooms are useable, if necessary, it is often desirable to have spaces that have certain qualities such as:
- space to walk around without tables or desks getting in the way
- larger wall spaces where paper or post it notes can be affixed
- room for multiple groups to work concurrently
- a room that inspires, not inhibits, creativity
- a space where the tools needed for collaboration are available
If you are using the jamming method, then the space will need to have a larger meeting space where information can be conveyed as well as smaller satellite rooms available for small group work. It is difficult to constantly try to reorganise spaces both before and after a session to be useful for a traditional classroom set up.
When both teaching service design and jamming, it is important to include industry as much as possible. While service design can be taught in a theoretical manner, it is really a hands-on skill that is enhanced by real work. This is where industry and business partnerships come in. Having an external partner that the students can work with to learn service design and how to use it in the real world is vital to the value of it being fully realised.
Scaling service design education for the future
While this article focuses on Finland, the principles and practices outlined here offer a roadmap for other nations aiming to embed human-centred innovation into their higher education sectors. These are three recommendations to get the most out of incorporating service design into curriculum.
1. Embedding principles across higher education
Moving forward, Finnish higher education institutions need to continue to add service design into as many degree programmes as possible. As this skillset has broad implications from public services to private companies and into the third sector, higher education in general has a responsibility to embed service design as deeply as possible in as many degree programmes as possible. It is important to treat it as a fundamental element of teaching and learning across disciplines.
Embedding these principles requires intentional and systemic curriculum design and recognition that real learning happens when students engage in solving real problems, collaboratively, and creatively.
2. Investing in educators
Faculty development and investment is crucial to scale the impact of service design. Supporting educators in learning and applying service design pedagogy will enable more cohesive and quality integration. This support requires partnerships with experienced practitioners, peer learning, and creating communities of practice that can guide and allow for practical application of it. It also includes, and arguably may begin with, mindset shifts that provide the space and methods for learning to be modernised and to look beyond the traditional classroom.
3. Strengthening external collaboration
As service design and human-centred design is more about how we respond to the challenges around us, it is important that we engage directly between companies, industries and the society around us. Real-world challenges while remaining in learning environments will work best for student learning. It is also important for those external to the institution to know what the newest methods for problem-solving are and are able to accommodate those needs and mindsets when new graduates join their organisation. It is through new ideas that occur on the ground and within organisations that they will begin to shift their mindset. The change will need to come from within where it can be demonstrated as relevant and necessary for tackling modern challenges.
Creating a universal competence
As we need more nuanced and fit-for-purpose services around us in these challenging times, the time is right for policymakers, academic leaders, and educators to recognise service design not as an optional tool in the toolbox, but as a strategic necessity. Embedding service design education at the heart of Finnish higher education, and higher education in general, is not only aligned with national innovation goals but is also a way to future-proof graduates and institutions alike.
Finland leads the way in many important rankings that reflect on how society has been designed and prioritised. It is through purposeful policymaking, early adoption, and commitment to using modern methods that Finland has been able to create a society where many things run well, run efficiently, and are reflecting, on a larger scale, the needs of the users. It is doing it again, only this time to ensure that service design, and its constituent elements, becomes a truly universal competence of future higher education graduates.
How can your institution, your education system, your society learn and embrace human-centred design, innovation, resilience, and responsiveness into your graduates and residents?
References
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Author
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Pamela Spokes
Specialist, TurbiiniPamela Spokes BA, MA, MBA, AmO. Educator in Service Design and Entrepreneurship with the Turbiini Pre-Incubator Programme in English.
About the author
