A design science approach for developing and evaluating a competence acquisition mobile app

The continuous development and acquisition of competences by a firm’s employee are fundamental instruments for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In this scenario, digital technologies play a relevant role in providing a ubiquitous platform to foster and facilitate this learning process. This paper describes the design, development and evaluation process of a competence acquisition mobile app. The evaluation of the app was carried out through an experimentation involving middle managers as well as project managers form an IT consulting firm. The results indicate that the use of the mobile app effectively improved users’ learning process outcomes as well as the ability to deploy the new competence – demonstrating that an ubiquitous learning environment can be paramount for the development of competence acquisition tools.