The Study of Service-Dominant Logic for Service System Innovation in the Context of University Social Responsibility Projects

University Social Responsibility (USR) becomes a global issue in recent years. Living in the located city, faculty, staffs, and students of a university integrate with the ecosystem nearby to perform their learning and research activities. USR projects integrated with various domain knowledge and professions drive the interaction between a university and its local community stakeholders to develop value-oriented service systems. However, it is still a challenging question to evaluate the outcomes of the USR projects to justify the resources spent and the returns generated, which is coined as Social Return On Investment (SROI). This research adopted a systemic perspective based on value propositions in Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL), and the concept of Obligatory Passage Point (OPP), framed by Actor-Network Theory, which connects the goals of stakeholders. In this study, we aim to analyze the USR projects conducted in National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) as examples to derive SROI measurements. Two example projects,“Dongmen Youth Hub” and “Museum of Dashanbei,” have been considered as the urban and rural revitalization projects as the target test beds for derived SROI measurements. The objectives of this two-year project are (1) to explore the insight of value proposition generation along with the service system development by the intervention via university projects; (2) to obtain the generalizable model of value proposition evolution from the real field context to explain the value proposition evolution on the system level; (3) establishing the social impact measurement by the insight of value proposition evolution on SROI perspective. At this stage, we have investigated the progress of assessing the SROI via literature and shared project information. We integrated the information from literature review and the USR documents from the Ministry of Education to draft the SROI assessment items in three aspects: economic, social, and environmental. We are now deploying the SROI items to involved instructors in USR related courses in Tsing Hua in past years to seek their feedbacks and modifications with Delphi technique. We then conclude the SROI assessment items at the end of Delphi process. By taking the SROI assessment items, we then can apply to existing USR projects or the future projects in National Tsing Hua University in the second year of this project. Moreover, we tend to extend this effort to connect with SDGs to support Regional Innovation Center to issue USR annual report for NTHU to guide the university level of strategic USR planning. Meanwhile, the process of generating, evaluating, executing the SROI assessment exercises the intellectual dialogues and collaboration cross different disciplines, which is the outcome of interdisciplinary value co-creation. Thus, the results of this research could contribute to the research literature in knowledge management