Recently, I was asked for “case studies of government skills development programs aligned with service science” …

Certainly there have been a number of efforts in this direction – some of the best I have seen were done some time ago for UK and Japan and Finland….   but no authoritative whitepaper exists…

Thus, a leadership opportunity exists for some nation, some university, and someone to do this work…

Certainly, many governments have service science-related efforts – mostly investments in education and research at top universities – but to create the sought after whitepaper (with case studies) needs a leader to create it.   Below I have listed some other reports that might factor into such a whitepaper…

I suspect the key finding would be this:   Most practical service science efforts are not about creating the new deep science (though this is very, very important) and not about creating new degree programs (those this is very, very important), but instead most practical service science related efforts are about ensuring three things:

(1) existing university graduates from all disciplines are more T-shaped (bread and depth)

(2) existing graduates gain experience solving real-world problems in teams to test their T-shaped abilities.

(3) existing employees have access to training material and experiences that challenge them to become more T-shaped problem-solvers.

The basics of being T-shaped in the context of service science are explained well in this service science and T-shaped professionals guidelines document.

In conclusion, with a few web searches it is easy to compile a list of documents from various nations around the world.   But reaching out to the people behind the websites, documents, and programs to interview them and others to piece together national case studies – would be a lot of work, but would make a lasting contribution to the field.

(1) Singapore

(2) UK and UK and UK

(3) Finland and Finland

(4) Germany

(5) India

(6) China

(7) Japan

(8) Ireland

(9) Korea

(10) Australia

(11) Netherlands and Netherlands

(12) USA and USA

(13) Switzerland

If you are interested in producing such a whitepaper report, please contact me and I will try to provide helpful pointers and perspective.  Also, if you know of other items like those above that should be included, please add them to the comments below – or email me: Jim Spohrer (spohrer@us.ibm.com)