Course essay
In the course ‘essay’ assignment you will apply many of the course theoretic concepts, models, and frameworks in the context of restaurant and food service business, to both design a restaurant of your own and to analyse the wider restaurant service industry. This assignment is done in the same team as the article review. Please assign yourself into a team.
Design your own restaurant
The essay is built of a design part and an analysis part. First, you are tasked with designing a service and the supporting service-system for your own pop-up restaurant or cafe in the style anyone can for ‘Restaurant Day - Ravintolapäivä’ -events.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Restaurant Day and the events, you can read about them here,
here, here, here, and in a research paper here.
You can also watch this short 2min video, or the 17min TedxTurku talk:
If you would be setting up a real restaurant you’d need to comply with many laws and regulations. You can get a glimpse of what those would be from this Finnish Food Safety Authority Evira 44 pages long guide for setting up a small restaurant. You are not expected to design a restaurant that would comply with all of the regulations discussed in the guide - but you can get a better idea what a restaurant service-system needs to have, even for a day, to operate well and handle the varied customers, to meet its value proposition and customer expectations, and provide a compelling customer experience.
The assignment
Your task is to design a fully operable pop-up restaurant (or cafe or whatever) of your own for a Restaurant Day.
What is the service concept and value proposition you aim to provide? What will you serve? How are you going to prepare the food? Who will you serve? How will the customers find you? Where is your restaurant? How will the customers hear about you? How will they find you? What trade-offs do you need to make? Will you need help in addition to your teammates to run the restaurant for a day? How you setup your front- and back-office premises and processes (in your campus dorm)? What management issues you anticipate will arise? And so on…
(Note: It is totally your call whether or not you want to incorporate COVID-19 pandemic as case context to your analysis.)
More in terms of course topics you are expected to provide (and the course module that discusses those topics).
- A written description of your restaurant concept.
- An analysis of its intended value proposition for the customers, and how the designed service system is geared towards delivering on it. (M2)
- An analysis of how your service system deals with varied sources of variety and variability, both internal and external. (M1)
- An analysis of your production process characteristics and type. (M1)
- A design of the intended customer experience, using customer journey mapping and accompanying written description. (M3)
- A design of the service system, using service blueprinting and accompanying written description. (M3)
Your submission evaluated based on issues like:
- The ‘consistency and coherence’ between the different parts i.e. between your overall description of the restaurant concept, the value proposition, customer journey map, blueprint, analysis of the variability management and production processes etc. These need to be ‘in line’ in relation to each other
- How well you apply appropriate concepts and tools from the learning materials in the assignment and demonstrate your understanding of the concepts and tools
Analyse the wider restaurant and food service industry
In the second part of the essay, you are expected to analyse the restaurant and food service industry using the theoretic concepts of the course. We expect you are all somewhat familiar with different restaurants, food delivery platforms, and the like that you can easily identify relevant case context for your analysis.
You could use the restaurant you designed yourself, campus cafeterias, fine-dining restaurants, food-delivery platforms (like Wolt, Foodoora, Deliveroo, Uber Eats), delivery-only restaurants (read more about them e.g. here and here), catering services, rent-a-kitchens for caterers, short-term kitchen rentals, varied fast-food chains, more specialised example like this one main course restaurant, or whatever ones you deem relevant. We assume your analysis would benefit from using different examples of the ‘concepts in actions’ e.g. by doing comparisons between different cases etc.
The assignment
Analyse the restaurant and food service industry using the course topics and contents, in an essay format:
- Baumol’s disease and the restaurant and food industry? (M1)
- What different uses of service solutions and service modularity can you identify in the restaurant and food service industry? What is the benefit of modularity in the cases you analyse? How use of modularity differs between restaurants of different kinds
? (M4)
- What is the relationship of modularity and productivity in the restaurant and food service industry? (M1+M4)
- What is the relationship of modularity and variability management in the restaurant and food service industry? (M1+ M4)
- What kind of ecosystems and platforms you can see operating in restaurant and food service industry? How are they changing the industry structures and competition? What are the implications for ‘traditional’ restaurants and actors in the industry? (M5)
- New, innovative restaurant concepts may go against the prevailing expectations and perceptions of the customers. Analyse the differences between your concept and existing concepts, and reflect on what obstacles your concept may need to overcome among customers, government, and the wider network or partners (M6).
General requirements
- Submit a pdf into the course essay submit box.
- Include a cover page with Date, course name, year, student names
- A description of the individual contribution of the teammates, e.g. in a table
- Include a table of contents
- 12p font, 1.0 line breaks. The "right" size of the submission is your choice. As a rough guide, we believe that something around 15 to 20 pages from a group of 3 to 4 person is probably quite ok.
- Submission DL 19.4. 23:00
Submit your essay in a single pdf file. Note: One submission per essay group.
Please put the authors' names and student numbers on the front page.