Another competition students chose to get involved in was the Global Service Jam. Two students - Prateek Khare and Neha Chhabra – helped organise an international event, the Global Service Jam 2012, which was hosted by Studentdesigners in Aberdeen at the Robert Gordon University Aberdeen in February.
Teams had less than 48 hours to develop and prototype completely new services inspired by a shared theme.
Over 2,060 participants from 40 countries across the globe participated in the Global Service Jam 2012. The Aberdeen Service Jam had over 20 participants from as far as Spain, Nigeria, Finland, Columbia and India. The theme of the Service Jam was 'The Hidden Treasure' and the purpose was to design a service by using the ideas generated during brainstorming sessions.
Prior to the event Prateek and Neha gathered empirical data, undertook a brand equity analysis of previously held service jams and developed a marketing strategy followed with viral marketing on the social media forums. After raising the event's brand awareness to a considerable extent, the event was live streamed, through LIVESTREAM, which accounted for over 11,000 viewer hours over the two day-long event.
During the idea generation process of this Jam, Prateek and Neha got the opportunity to apply the scenario planning skills they acquired during the Exploring the International Business Experience (EIBE) module in MBA programme. This helped them to facilitate participants in eliciting new ideas and forming clusters of these ideas.
The SBS students, together with the CEO of Student Designers, planned a basic structure to host the event at GSJ Aberdeen's headquarters and managed the operation of the new service design process.
One of the services that was designed during the course was named "Jargon Busters". The underlying idea behind the service was to simplify financial jargons into layman terms. After drafting the business model and empirical data gathering through random sampling on the streets, a few examples of financial jargon were chosen and simple demonstrations were recorded with the help of clay, chart paper and pen. These demonstrations were later uploaded on the web.
By the end of this Service Jam, five brand new viable services were designed at Aberdeen, along with a total of 345 services from across the world.