Improving Improvement in Education

Lately, I have been thinking about the dynamics of a truly smart education system in the age of cognitive systems and social networks, trying to formulate what a “Moore’s Law For Education” might be like. So I was delighted when I received an email from my colleague Bill Daul, about a keynote speech by Prof. Louis …

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Call For Papers – ISES Global Conference on Service Excellence 2014

From: Institute of Service Excellence <ise@smu.edu.sg> Date: Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 7:03 PM Subject: Call For Papers – ISES Global Conference on Service Excellence 2014 To: stephen.kwan@sjsu.edu   Dear Prof Kwan,   Greetings and happy new year from the Institute of Service Excellence at Singapore Management University (ISES)!   Later this year, we will …

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Some trends and future scenarios

A.      What are the most important competence areas or science fields at the moment ? In the future ? Since innovation happens at the boundaries, and they are all important, it is important to look for sciences that are “well spaced” and fundamental, as well as integrative. Service science is integrative so is important. Physics, …

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Trends in Sourcing and Re-Shoring

Regarding trends and ongoing ISSIP discussions on sourcing and re-shoring…  manufacturing is becoming a local recycling service and call-centers are becoming self-service cognitive systems learning from crowd-sourcing…. (1)ISSIP COI (Community of Interest) on Next Gen Manufacturing:  A weekly 30 min informal call series (community of interest) on the topic of next-generation manufacturing, many topics will …

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Service System Continuous Improvement

The gist of service system continuous improvement is very simple, and inspired by the work of two friends and colleagues:  Doug Engelbart (father of augmentation theory – who passed away July 2013) and James March (father of organization theory – Emeritus at Stanford). Thanks to March and Engelbart, most everyone already understands the factors that …

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ISSIP Content Planning Committee – Organizing the Best Service Innovation Related Content

ISSIP has a new chair of the Content Planning Committee.  A first Digital Content Improvement Project is underway: The Goal of the project is to aggregate and “package” organic and in-organic content developed by ISSIP members and wider service innovation community to guarantee intuitive user experience and make ISSIP page a place to go for …

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United we stand; divided, we fall. No one can be passive.

You will be rewarded, if you read to this strange, but interesting sentence “This places a University between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place.” … This email made my day, and provided a nice possible motto for our upcoming T Summit 2014… “United we stand; divided, we fall.  No one can be passive.” ….posted with permission (and of course, these are …

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Starting New Academic Disciplines: 10 Do’s and 10 Don’ts

Do’s and Don’ts of starting new academics disciplines Do’s 1. Do read Andrew Abbot’s  “Chaos of Disciplines” and “System of Professions” 2. Do study existing disciplines that overlap the new discipline, and how they began and took hold 3. Do build a social network of all the faculty currently teaching aspects of the discipline 4. …

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Pre-reads: Spelling’s Report (2006) and “Engineering Flexner” Report (2007)

Both the “Spellings Report” and the “Engineering Flexner Report” provide insightful analysis and recommendations for improving US Higher Education.  The original Carnegie Foundation sponsored  “Flexner Report” was an early 20th Century report (book-sized report) that led to the radical transformation of medical education in the US and Canada. While these two newer reports are full …

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21C Talent and 21C Citizens

The T Summit 2014 event will focus on graduating tomorrow’s talent today, the future workforce, future citizens, and  industry-academic partnerships that dovetail to co-create twenty-first century (21C) talent.  21C talent includes university graduates and lifelong learning professionals who are T-shaped with both depth and breadth across disciplines, sectors, and cultures (see image below). To understand …

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