Mastering Creating Value

Introduction

The capabilities we should develop to compete against advanced technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in the workforce of the future are called ‘twenty-first-century skills’. There are several versions of twenty-first-century skills. Griffin et al. (2012) published a version of skills that covers 4 categories and 10 skills. The four categories are ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working, and living in the world. The 10 skills are (a) creativity and innovation; (b) critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making; (c) learning to learn and metacognition; (d) communication; (e) collaboration (teamwork); (f) information literacy; (g) ICT literacy; (h) citizenship—local and global; (i) life and career; and (j) personal and social responsibility—including cultural awareness and competence (Griffin et al., 2012, Chapter 2). While these skills are important means to survive in the twenty-first century for today’s students, they are defocused due to their wide range.

We would suggest shifting the focus from the means to creating value as the end (Mahajan, 2017). We name creating value school¹ students who have a clear mindset to learn to create value in this article and intend for the article to be a guide for creating value and creating value schools.

Why Does Creating Value Matter for Everyone (Including You)?

Creating value should be the first priority in the twenty-first century because it is the age of services. While the concept of creating value was typically tied to selling products in the twentieth century, offering services has become the main focus of creating value in the twenty-first century. Service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) is an interdisciplinary framework that explains this shift and offers unified vocabulary to facilitate smooth academic communication between various disciplines.

One well-known assertion of S-D logic is that ‘value is always uniquely and phenomenologically determined by the beneficiary’ (Lusch & Vargo, 2014, p. 16). Value is determined by customers who purchase a service, and the perceived value can vary based on context (i.e., time, location, popularity, etc.). Therefore, value cannot be designed by a service provider in advance. However, this does not necessarily mean that no one other than the customer can be involved in the process of creating value. On the contrary, anyone—typically frontline staff at stores and call centres—can help create value. This means that everyone is potentially responsible for creating value for a beneficiary who is in front of them or waiting for their support somewhere in the world.

All of us are members of a community and are responsible for creating value therein. Thus, active involvement is essential. The value we create will become an indispensable part of it even if our contributions are as small as raindrops. This is the reason creating value matters for everyone (including you).

What Value Is Expected for Creation?

Before getting into the question of how we can create value, we must pay attention to the importance of individuals having ‘a mental map of value’. A comparable example from everyday life is how a second language learner must be able to hear the second language spoken before he or she can have a conversation successfully with someone in that language. The conversation will slow down or stop if he or she cannot understand the real-time flow of the conversation. The situation is the same in creating value. Students must learn what value is expected before they learn skills that create value. Skills that create value are useless if the students cannot discriminate targeted value from pointless value. We cannot necessarily expect students to have work experience or life experience with this; therefore, they must be able to build a mental map of targeted value before being able to create value.

Such a mental map is a mental model, which is a central construct in Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2005, 2014). Learning is not simply the transfer of explicit knowledge to learners but rather learner-centred cognitive process to build a mental model that helps them solve their problems and/or achieve their goals.

To help them learn to form a mental model for creating value, we propose letting them read a collection of working visual diagrams that capture the whole process of creating value in individual lives and in businesses (Kalbach, 2016; Osterwalder, 2010). We stress that it is useless for students to acquire visual diagramming skills—even if the target issues of the diagramming are real problems—unless they have a mental model of targeted value on an individual level.

How Can We Create Value?

Scardamalia et al. (2012) states that conventional teaching-centred learning is ‘working backward from goals’ and new learning-centred learning is the ‘emergence of new competencies’. The former approach begins with an educational goal and ends when the goal is mastered through teaching. The latter approach has no fixed goals. Instead, learners can set their own new educational goals as they master their current ones.

We believe that collaborative learning is the best way to create value because it mirrors the ‘emergence of new competencies’ approach to learning twenty-first-century skills, facilitated through collaboration between team members and accelerated through competition between teams.

There are lots of workshop designs for conducting team learning. However, we reemphasize the importance of having a mental model before problem-solving. Without an adequate mental model, learners cannot develop the correct next target by themselves even if they follow workshop procedures.

Mastering Creating Value

To summarize the discussion so far, we posed three questions:

Why does creating value matter for everyone (including you)?

Our answers are:

Everyone is a member of a community and is responsible for creating value therein. Thus, active involvement is essential.

Appendix A of this article provides a design for the ‘Creating Value Challenge’. Each school has its own educational content for creating value; hence, the challenge proposal is not a replacement for that. Instead, the challenge proposal is for helping creating value school students deepen their collaborative learning to create value on a worldwide scale.

Conclusion

In his book, Aoun (2017) discusses how to ‘educate the next generation of college students to invent, to create, and to discover—filling needs that even the most sophisticated robot cannot’. He stresses how experiential learning can help students become ‘robot-proof’. While he uses the term ‘robot-proof’, his argument can also be ‘AI-proof’ because AI is indispensable in creating smart robots.

Because robot and AI technologies will be ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, many blue-collar jobs may disappear because of robots, and many white-collar jobs may disappear because of AI. This prediction could be interpreted as we are not as smart as we think we are. No one is guaranteed lifelong success despite spending a lot of money on higher education; hence, people must update their abilities into twenty-first-century skills to adapt to the changing times. Creating value schools and adopting our ‘Creating Value Challenge’ will offer opportunities for people to do this.

Finally, we suggest one future research subject. We propose that we will not need to compete against robots and AI if we can acquire twenty-first-century skills by engaging in collaborative learning with them. The question of whether or not humans can learn from AI could be fundamental in knowledge science in the AI era (Kohda, 2020). While we need to explore how robots and AI can help create value in practical service solutions (Kaartemo & Helkkula, 2018), we also need to study effective collaborative learning with robots and AI for creating value schools.

Appendix A

The ‘Creating Value Challenge’ Design for Connecting Creating Value Schools

Acquire knowledge about a [COMMON TOOL] for ‘Aligning Value’

Having a common tool would be a basis for communicating ideas and fair competition between creating value school students.