Global Village : Ett utvecklingsarbete av konceptet Global Village utifrån co-creation perspektiv

Sammanfattning: Oita University in Japan has created a meeting space called the Global Village that was inspired by Marshall McLuhan's (1962) theory that globalization contributes to an increased community between people from different parts of the world. It was created to increase interaction among students on campus and is intended for both international and local students. The vision for the place is for individuals to exchange information, knowledge, ideas, and cultures which promotes knowledge exchange and shared learning. However, the University of Oita faces a challenge regarding the Global Village as there is a lack of participation and interaction in the place. Which leads to the vision of Global Village not being fulfilled. The purpose of this thesis is to study how the students experience the Global Village. This was done to gain an understanding of how the place works and to develop ideas to improve the Global Village with the support of the co-creation perspective. Co-creation is about collaboration between individuals who could create some kind of value in the form of new ideas and solutions. Based on the problems identified in the study, the improvement ideas have been inspired by the co-creation theory to include in the Global Village at the university. The study was based on a qualitative approach to answer the research questions and there were several semi-structured interviews conducted with students from Oita University. The study found that open innovation has some factors that are important for developing the concept of the Global Village. And to make it a well-functioning co-creation space that provides value for the students. Those factors that were used within open innovation are networking and value creation, which were an inspiration to create a model. The different solution in the model is based on the problems that were identified in the Global Village. The model contains several different solution proposals to improve the Global Village at Oita University.