Dr. Oscar Person is an assistant professor in Design Integration at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture and the team leader of the Strategic Design Integration and Management (SDIM) research group at the Department of Design. Oscar’s current research interests span the ways organizations acquire capabilities in design to the application of design-based work practices in development processes, with a special interest in the expressive nature of designers’ work. He has published on various facets of design and business in, among others, Design Issues, Design Management Journal, Design Management Review, Design Studies, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, and Journal of Marketing Management. Next to his research, Oscar teaches and supervise students at the bachelor, master’s and doctoral level at Aalto University, including thesis supervision at the International Design Business Management (IDBM) and Collaborative & Industrial Design (CoID) master programs at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Iikka is a service designer with a strong focus on making public services more user centric, effective and agile. He believes that by default the service users should always be involved in the design process, and more often in the production as well. This means a paradigm shift in the way we define and understand services. Making public services more upstream means that professionals have to redefine their role as partners and facilitators rather than problem solvers. More and more services should be co-produced with the people who use them, rather than considering users as passive – and grateful – consumers.

Iikka’s core competence is in qualitative research, co-design and prototyping. His role varies in different projects from customer insight analysis to service design and project management. In previous years, Iikka gained experience in social services and health promotion projects, peer-to-peer services and community development projects.

Reima has more than 10 years experience in designing services and user experiences. His career with service design has taken him to work with various public and private organizations with both Finnish and international clients across different continents. As a lead designer, he has been responsible for many big development projects. He easily manages discussions from business to technology and so has the ability to work with professionals from different fields.

Reima strongly believes that better customer experiences and services can only be designed together with the people who actually use the services and with the people who work together to create them. His expertise is in co-design and participation. Reima is an experienced workshop facilitator and speaker, both in Finnish and English.

Mikko Laukkanen specializes in customer experience management, service design and service business, strategic marketing, business model innovation and innovation management. He has an extensive background of consulting and research projects with large international firms, and is a well-liked lecturer and sought-after public speaker.

He has pioneered a number of experiential teaching methods in his executive and university teaching. At Aalto University Executive Education, Dr. Laukkanen works as the Academic Director and is responsible for the academic quality of Aalto EE’s extensive portfolio of programs. He has a Doctor of Science (Economics and Business Administration) degree from Aalto University School of Business and a Master of Science degree in Economics with a major in Marketing from the Helsinki School of Economics. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Business Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.