Service-Oriented Business Design for IT Students

In this Full Innovative Practice Paper, we present a teaching approach, based on service science, for integrating a business curriculum in the engineering educational program. Our approach is a composition of experiential learning, systems thinking, and service-oriented architecture. In the course, students have less content (e.g., a few heuristics to analyze a business environment) to master, but they apply it in different contexts (e.g., written case studies, presentations from live lectures, students’ own projects). Our study shows that paced repetition of the same technique with different emotional connectedness to the subject under analysis enables students to practice the same skill without experiencing boredom of repetition, hence, they continue practicing. The service-oriented heuristics teach students how, with the help of a service canvas and an online tool, to analyze businesses and to recognize the role of IT in a business environment. Students demonstrate a higher propensity to master new knowledge when they embody their experience and feel cognitively closer to the studied materials. Further results show that the acquired service-oriented mindset helps students to reuse their learnings in other contexts.