Abstract:
Higher Education Institutions are operating in a more and more competitive environment. In the case of Southeast Asia for instance, the creation of the Asian Economic Community (AEC as part of the ASEAN), is allowing AEC members and International universities to open campuses in any of the 10 founding countries without having to have a local university partner. Furthermore, the number of entry students is currently declining due to pyramid age gap in most Asian countries. Consequently, universities are operating in a much more competitive environment and in order to compete, or even just to survive, they need to provide more than just excellent education. The services that are provided to students must also meet students and parents high demanding and high quality expectations. University service providers are in general not fully equipped with the tools and mindset to develop novel services that will fully meet students expectations. This research looked at how using a co-creation approaches and tools, involving graduate students and university service providers, could help developing novel services. An action research approach was used to test this approach and shown positive outcomes in helping building stronger understanding between university service providers and students, but also by helping building empathy between them leading to the co-creation of novel university students services ideas. This study was conducted in a private Thai university but the researchers believe it could be similarly applied in any other university context (private or public and in any other country).