Haaga-Helia Labs: Courage, Cooperation and Corporeality

Teachers in tertiary education are faced with the question of how to prepare their students for work life in a global world. Ideally, pedagogical innovations would be carried out in multicultural and multidisciplinary teams and in collaboration with colleagues from several different countries and universities.

The Ulysseus European University alliance and its Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP) provide a viable platform for pedagogical innovations within the framework of international staff and student groups. From the perspective of Haaga-Helia UAS in the role of hosting organisation, we can offer unique HH Labs for experimental, professional and participatory activities.

This article explores the use of two Haaga-Helia Labs in a BIP organised by Haaga-Helia Competence Area of Languages and Global Competences. The Labs included the service experience lab, Lab8, for developing service design skills, complemented by embodied activities in the Sales & eCom Lab.

In May 2024, the organising team from Haaga-Helia was joined by French, Italian and Slovak colleagues in a BIP named ”Developing Cultural Competences through Business Relocation”. The face-to-face meeting on Haaga-Helia Pasila Campus had been preceded by several months of careful preparation and introductory online classes for the 35 students from five Ulysseus universities (Italy, France, Slovakia, Montenegro and Finland), representing cultures from all around the world, not Europe only.

Empowering and successful Ulysseus BIP organised with the help of HH Labs

The HH Labs served as a platform for a holistic and embodied learning experience with the purpose of enhancing tranversal skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and courage together with team skills and intercultural communication – all paramount for doing international business. The pedagogical backbone of the intensive week was founded on a real-life assignment by an internationally known Finnish brand, BYPIAS, a company currently looking for pop-up store opportunities on the foreign market.

The multi-cultural student teams benefited from the cultural knowledge of their home countries when creating business plans for BYPIAS, a lifestyle concept for sustainable fashion, clothes and home decor. The theoretical framework was based on market analysis (PESTELE), customer understanding (e.g. buyer persona), consumer behaviour and cultural understanding of the countries and cultures of the participants.

The end of the intensive week culminated in the students presenting their business plans and ideas for pop up store locations to the founder and CEO of BYPIAS. Naturally, the valuable comments and feedback were highly appreciated by the students, and, similarly, the commissioner was very pleased to obtain fresh ideas from the energetic multicultural presenters in the beginning of their careers.

Versatile Lab8 tool factory for customer understanding

In our work as Senior Lecturers in tourism, hospitality and business degree programmes we have learnt to appreciate Haaga-Helia Lab8 tools and, especially, the Tool Factory – Tools for Service Design in cases where the students and course participants need to build empathy towards the customers by identifying their needs, gain and pain points, come up with buyer personas, ideate and prototype services or experiences and test them. We have found the tools for developing services very helpful, concrete and easy to use in many course implementations.

That is why we saw the benefit of introducing them to the students in the Ulysseus BIP.

The following hands-on service design tools were implemented by the students: Five Why´s Interview, Empathy Map and Persona Map Canvas. First, the students started by finding customer understanding through “Five why’s”-interviews to understand the beliefs, motivations and values of the customers. With help of the interviews in their multicultural course environment they completed empathy maps to gain even a deeper understanding of how their peers and other representatives of their target culture make their buying decisions.

Furthermore, they used a persona map canvas to internalize the ideal customers, relating to them and then coming up with the business idea and concrete plan for how BYPIAS could best expand to their target market.

The students found the tools easy to apply for their project. The following feedback by one participant sums up the benefits of the Lab8 tools:

“Creating customer personas, focusing on Italy as our target market, was an exciting process where we interviewed our Italian classmates and teachers to learn about their buying habits. They provided valuable insights into the Italian market, helping us understand and describe it better. Working together, we developed detailed and accurate customer personas which helped us in our project.”

Corporeality in the Sales & eCom Lab

Next, we will move on to examining the physical premises of the Sales & eCom Lab, where AI-based technology is offered for analysing facial expressions together with emotional responses, e.g., joy, sadness and surprise (Niemi & Linnasalmi 2019).

The lab environment enabled us to explore pedagogical means of teaching “courage skills” and embodiment. With little previous experience of the lab environment, we recognised an opportunity to use technology as a filter when addressing sensitive issues such as body language, voice prosody and facial expressions.

To exemplify, for instance Finnish-born students might speak English with a flat intonation accompanied by minimal facial expressions, while, on the other hand, a Southern European student might talk so vividly and loudly that he/she ends up appearing intimidating to a more reserved person from the North.

Evidently, with the help of the advanced Sales and eCom Lab technology, the teacher can then provide objective and quantified data on how the students´ communication appears to an outsider, without the risk of sounding too intrusive when addressing issues such as body language.

“Courage” has been stated as an important transformative skill for the future. However, how to teach courage? It might me claimed that courage starts from an embodied feeling of strength and vitality. The technology in the Sales and eCom Lab invited students to try out the expression of extreme emotions, which in turn, resulted in increased vitality.

There was one instant when a soft-spoken student spoke so quietly and with so little expression, that the technical equipment failed to record her. The student then collected her spirits and had a second round with an excellent outcome. In a normal classroom situation, the teacher might have asked the student to speak up – resulting in the student getting even more stressed by the situation. In summary, this might be regarded as an example of technology-assisted courage training, or in the language of embodiment: Training corporeality for a corporate career.

Conclusion

We have now demonstrated how HH Labs can be organically integrated into experiential learning. Lab8 and the Sales & eCom Lab provided tools for connecting with peers and for working intensively and purposefully towards a shared goal, that of creating a business plan based on cultural insights.

Additionally, the HH Lab tools provided a framework for the Ulysseus teacher team to quickly adapt to their roles as facilitators during the intensive week. The learning experience thus turned out to be participatory for students and teachers alike.

Finally, after a successful project, we give the floor to our students in summing up the joyful, collaborative and educational intensive week on Haaga-Helia Pasila Campus:

“On Day 5, the final day of our BIP program, we presented our posters and sales pitches. The CEO of BYPIAS joined us via a virtual call to review our ideas. This day reminded me the realization I had during our speed debating session: despite our different backgrounds, we shared a similar mindset. Before the presentation, we experienced a memorable coincidence, all five of us showed up wearing white, without any prior discussion about our dress code. This funny and unplanned synchronicity highlighted how deeply we had connected over the past five days. It gave us a final boost of unity and confidence for our presentation.”