Postgraduate Course: Data-Driven Innovation in Services (Online) (EFIE11533)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines how organisations design and improve services using data, with an emphasis on how service operations, digital platforms, and experimentation shape performance and user experience. Students will learn practical methods for mapping and redesigning services, including customer journey mapping and Process Chain Network (PCN) analysis, and will use these to identify co-production points, bottlenecks, and dependencies.
The course then shows how data supports service decisions, covering data sources (including open data), data standardisation, and a simple Bayesian approach to personalisation. Students will also learn how to run and interpret service experiments, plan staged rollouts, and monitor outcomes after launch. Throughout the course addresses governance issues such as platform dependence, privacy, discrimination, and 'panoptic' sorting, and they will apply the ideas in a group service redesign project and an individual case analysis. |
| Course description |
This course develops students' ability to analyse, design, and govern data-enabled services as operational systems. It aims to build competence in (i) service innovation concepts and business model change in services, (ii) service design methods that represent customer experience and operational structure, (iii) data design for service decision-making and personalisation, (iv) experimentation and evaluation methods used in service development and rollout, and (v) governance of digital services, including platform dependency, discrimination risk, and accountability mechanisms.
The course sits at the intersection of service operations management, service design, innovation studies, and data-enabled decision systems. It addresses the shift from services as human-delivered processes to services delivered through combinations of human work, digital platforms, and automated decision rules. The course treats 'data-driven' not as a technology label but as a change to service production, measurement, and control, with implications for scale, quality, fairness, and governance.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Online Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities. Students should note that their interactions may be recorded and live-streamed (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details). There will, however, be options to control whether or not your video and audio are enabled.
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, a physical keyboard, and internet access.
|
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
|
Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) 3,000 Word Group Service Portfolio (50%)
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4
2) 2,000 Word Individual Take-Home Case Analysis (50%)
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 3 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Formative feedback will be provided for an outline of the final individual report. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate and work with quantitative and qualitative techniques to plan how an innovative service can be improved using detailed data from the service's operations and the service's customers.
- Demonstrate how organisations can identify opportunities for developing and delivering new services by building on their existing processes and resources.
- Blend their knowledge of techniques to propose and communicate approaches fitting with the social and technical constraints of an organisational context.
- Be able to communicate to a general audience the quantitative and qualitative elements of proposed processes for service innovation.
|
Reading List
Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Henry W. Chesbrough (2003). Harvard Business School Press.
Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel (2005). MIT Press.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton M. Christensen (1997). Harvard Business School Press.
This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence, Markus Edgar Hormess, Jakob Schneider (2016). O'Reilly
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing, Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, Ya Xu (2020). Cambridge University Press.
Essentials of service design and innovation : developing high-value service businesses with PCN analysis, 4th edition, Scott Sampson. (2015)
The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waal (2018). Oxford University Press.
The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, Oscar H. Gandy Jr. (1993).
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshona Zuboff (2019), Profile Books. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Services,Service Innovation,Service Improvement,Analytics,Technological Risks |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Mr Ian Graham
Tel: (0131 6)50 3797
Email: Ian.Graham@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr David Murphy
Tel:
Email: dmurphy7@ed.ac.uk |
|
|
University Homepage