Understanding Innovation in Education: A Service Co-Production Perspective

Luis Rubalcaba

Economies, 2022, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-22

Abstract: Innovation in education has been heavily focused on pedagogical, technological, or regulatory elements, while service innovation relates to other elements involving interpersonal and community co-production too. This paper provides a conceptual framework to understand innovation in education from a service economic perspective. This is done by bridging two rather disconnected research areas: service innovation and education innovation. The results indicate that (i) the characteristics of education as a service (such as interactive co-production) should be taken into account to better understand how innovations are created and implemented; (ii) innovation modes in education can be aligned with service innovation modes, mainly when a public service logic is adopted; (iii) the tension existing in service innovation between customization and standardization is replicated in the education sector; and (iv) multiagent frameworks in service innovation are particularly visible in innovative learning communities. Managerial and policy implications should be guided by service-friendly principles such as freedom, autonomy, and subsidiarity.

Keywords: education; services; innovation; co-production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E F I J O Q (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/10/5/96/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7099/10/5/96/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jecomi:v:10:y:2022:i:5:p:96-:d:796674

Access Statistics for this article

Economies is currently edited by Ms. Adore Zhou

More articles in Economies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().