Scaling up Diversity and Inclusion: From Classroom to Municipality

This paper investigates opportunities for scaling up the diversity and inclusion of international residents at the level of municipality service offerings. The starting point is a set of small-scale service design projects actively involving municipal representatives and university students. This collaboration was part of a service design course at Aalto University addressing challenges faced by the municipality of Espoo, Finland. Through triangulation of three data sources i) pre-course meetings, ii) email surveys during the course, and iii) semi-structured interviews with participating municipal representatives after the course, this paper offers insights on how small-scale service design collaborations can facilitate the scaling up of international diversity and inclusion within public services. Our findings identify prerequisites for scaling up (i.e., exposure and impetus for change, diversity and inclusionimmersion, and personal empowerment), but they also highlight institutional hindrances (i.e., institutional inertia, reframing and reverting, and implementation paralysis) that warrant further investigations