Stage: Service delivery

The Rome Collaboratory: the role of Living Labs in fostering local development

LabGov, short for the LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons, is a global network that aims to explore methodologies and policies for collaboration and shared management of urban spaces/resources through empirical and applied research platforms. Currently, LabGov consists of seven Urban Living Labs (ULL) spanning across Europe, the United States, and Latin America. The overarching objective of these Living Labs is to analyze the efficacy of ‘commoning’ – a term coined by Dr. Elinor Ostrom in her pioneering research on cooperative governance strategies. The work of LabGov’s co-directors Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione is aimed at operationalizing Elinor Ostrom’s framework and the design principles of institutional design she elaborated for the cooperative governance of common pool resources to the urban context with the appropriate adaptations. This work is synthetized  in a series of scholarly articles (C. IAIONE, Città e beni comuni, in G. ARENA and C. IAIONE (eds.), L’Italia dei beni comuni, Rome, 2012, p. 127; C. IAIONE, La città come un bene comune, in Aedon, 2013, 1, p. 31; C. Iaione, Governing the urban commons, in Italian journal of public law, 2015, vol. 7, 1, 2015, p. 190; S. Foster and C. Iaione The City as a commons, Yale Journal of Law and Policy, 34, 2, 2016; C. Iaione and E. De Nictolis, Urban pooling, in Fordham Urban Law Journal, 44:3, 2017; S. Foster and C. Iaione, Ostrom in the city. Design Principles and Practices for the Urban Commons, in Handbook of the Study of the Commons, (D. Cole, B. Hudson, J. Rosenbloom eds.), Routledge, 2019) the authors argued about the need to create public-civic or public-community partnerships as a policy and legal tool to ground a cooperation between the public administration and social innovators through co-design processes to realize projects of general interest in cities.

This case study herein will focus on a project – the “Rome Collaboratory”, developed by LabGov’s LUISS Roma Lab based out of LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy. The Rome Collaboratory currently works as part of the OpenHeritage  project , which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No776766 . The Rome Collaboratory has been selected as a best practice to look at in order to analyze the role of living labs in fostering local development.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

City inhabitants and their experiences are integral to co-creation methodologies. As aforementioned, co-creation’s human-centric and core structure that involves user-input is paving the way for nuanced multi-stakeholder interactions. It prioritizes the inclusion of all city inhabitants in order to guarantee mutually beneficial project outcomes and stronger community linkages. Co-creation projects, like the Rome Collaboratory, proactively and consciously valorise the role of users and city inhabitants, and they are changing the landscape of shared governance. The bi-cognitive institutions and the Rome Collaboratory activities, which produce connections leading toward effective and productive interventions, sustain the people engaged and empower communities. It is evident that the city inhabitants are driving the program content development and are central in the design process. In addition to the aforementioned bike tours, diffuse hotel, and Collaboration Day, the meetings during the co-creation process inspired a new Living Memory Exhibition and a Local Campaign for the districts. The exhibition plans to feature the artwork, photography, and musical talents of district residents and seeks to share their interpretation of cultural heritage with the public. Moreover, the Rome Collaboratory team will lead a tailored and streamlined communication campaign to give visibility to the district’s new projects and to promote use of digital applications. In working with community members and local actors across the three districts, there has been a significant increase in civic engagement and shared interest in the proposed revitalization projects.

Co-creation process

Living Labs and the associated methodologies are broadly defined – varying in purpose and function. The leading definition of a living lab is “innovation networks based on the philosophy of open innovation where users become equivalent to other participants” (Pop 2018). Within the OpenHeritage’s LL framework, the objectives of the Rome Collaborative are primarily to promote processes of adaptive reuse and sustainable management of cultural heritage. The Rome Collaborative and the five other Cooperative Heritage Labs are sites determined to have the potential to increase community engagement and build resiliency. The creation of the six LLs is part of the OpenHeritage’s broader objective to create a network built on two main pillars:
  • Open Knowledge – ensuring easy access the knowledge generated by the project including discoveries based on project outcomes and within the development process;
  • Open Space – creation of platforms for social cohesion and cultural management where views of different stakeholders (local actors/administrative professionals, financial partners, researchers, policymakers, civil society, and undeserved groups) are equally considered
The Rome Collaboratory is characterized as a living lab due to its co-creation approach for engaging in research and experimentation. It is a space that adds public value by operating as a platform for exchange of knowledge, tools, and ideas for innovative solutions.

Digital Transformation Process

As an innovation method, living labs are spaces where collaboration and multisided discussions are encouraged. They serve as platforms where differentiated approaches and nuanced methodologies are tested and ultimately proven incubators for nuanced strategizing in governance, private sector industry, and social enterprise. More precisely, it embodies, “an ecosystem approach in which end users and other stakeholders are involved in the development of an innovation over a long period of time, in a real-life environment, following an iterative process (Niitamo & Kulkki, 2006; Schuurman et al., 2012) applying multi-method, user-centric innovation research with a strong focus on user empowerment and real-world experimentation.” There are several examples of living labs across sectors, yet the focus of the LabGov and the Rome Collaboratory is to analyze the effects of co-city protocol in transforming culturally untapped areas in chosen European cities. The LUISS Roma Lab used LabGov’s Co-city protocol as the guiding methodology for the Rome CHL’s conceptualization sessions and communal brainstorming activities. The protocol consists of six phases 1) Cheap talking, 2) Mapping, 3) Practicing, 4) Prototyping, 5) Testing, and 6) Modelling. Each phase is a part of the overall objective to guide policymakers, researchers, and urban communities in co-governance experiences. The process is innovative in that it is an output of numerous field-experiments and investigations on patterns, transitions, and procedures within the public policy development process. It situates the city as an infrastructure that enables participatory approaches and aligns with the Open Knowledge and Open Guidance principles of the OpenHeritage project. Importantly, there is concrete evidence for the validity of the process due to its survival through and support from three consecutive public administrations in Italy.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

In the context of the Rome Collaboratory, the inclusion of citizens’ ideas, desires, and needs, in the design and implementation phases of the revitalization project produces public value and varied approaches to governance. Further, the revitalization project specifically targets local public administrations, policymakers, civic organizations, residents, and social entrepreneurs, to ensure methodologies actively address the needs and wants of all future beneficiaries working in the public sector. The intention behind Rome Collaboratory spaces is rooted in the preconception of public value. This case example defines public value as the value an organization provides to a society and understands it in terms of the benefits it offers to society as a whole. It measures the value by how well it meets the public citizens’ inherent and changing needs. Therefore, to add value, the application of LL methodologies in the public sector has to generate outcomes that reflect the communities’ desires. This requires multi-actor engagement and resource pooling in preliminary stages and ultimately precludes shared governance strategies.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

In the context of the LUISS Roma Lab and the newly formed Rome Collaboratory, there is an evident transformation in how consumers are interacting with public services and a fundamental shift in the user-service relationship. Most notably, the integration of a quintuple helix model and the presence of living labs has translated into increased civic engagement and participation. Residents and end-users are not simply service recipients, rather they shape the delivery processes and actively contribute in co-governance sessions hosted at cooperative spaces. Insofar, this has raised the level of awareness of the challenges limiting the Centocelle district from attracting tourism and has reengaged the community. By having a stake in the adaptation process and providing input, the districts’ residents feel empowered to lead and it has resulted in an overall shift in perceptions of their role in the revitalization project. Fundamentally, these new models and theoretical applications are conducive to civic autonomy and localized management of shared resources.

Transferability & Replicability

The intended deliverables of Living Labs and co-creation methodologies more broadly, are to alter the existing service experience/relationship and to produce new techniques for governance interventions. Traditionally, governments and public organizations delivered services to users in a top-down manner – adapting policies with minimal external input. The LabGov co-city protocol and the subsequent co-cities including Co-Roma served as experiments for exploring new organizational mechanisms for public services. By positioning the city as a ‘shared urban commons’ the co-city approach disrupts the conventional services to end-user relationship. Therefore, delivery of services evolves and adjusts to meet the needs of citizens operating within these shared/co-governed spaces. The quintuple helix model, which is the concept of a public-private-commons partnership intended to overcome the division between public versus private management of the commons, gives relevance to the role of knowledge institutions. Different from the linear service experience, positioning civil society, universities, community organizations, local enterprises, and other knowledge institutions at the core of the model creates a new form of social contract. Complex challenges demand increasingly active and shared participation of urban authorities and local, civic, private, and community actors.

Success Factors

A key attribute of Living Labs as an innovative tool is their ability to produce new and/or enhance pre-existing networks. Often, living labs are conducive to new interactions and bring together actors to operate within both established and emerging networks. By hosting co-creation sessions, testing new co-governance strategies, or enabling actors to engage through new avenues, living labs are acting as intermediaries between innovators and the intended beneficiaries. As previously mentioned, the Rome Collaboratory is strategically designed to be human-centric and to keep city inhabitants’ needs at the core of the co-governance model. However, it is worth noting how preliminary networks developed by the LUISS Roma Lab and ENEA are interfacing with the new innovation spaces and are serving as baseline models for future co-governance networks. In particular, the pre-established co-city network and the Centoc’è  smart-city e-network are essential foundational networks that the Rome Collaboratory can replicate as it strives to develop a platform for crowdsourcing and collaboration between stakeholders.  The methodological protocol for the construction of urban neighbourhoods and collaborative communities (the co-city protocol) documents work in the field of theoretical and applied research on urban co-governance to summarize principles, techniques and solutions aimed at spreading urban cooperativism. The subsequent networks that have surfaced out of the establishment of these co-cities and the co-city protocol at large are transforming knowledge exchange practices.

The MEF DSII Living Lab

In early 2018, the Directorate for Information Systems and Innovation (DSII) of the General Administration, Human Resources and Services department of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) established through the Cloudify NoiPA financing a Living Lab (LL), also known as an Experience Centre at the MEF premises. Distinct from other Living Labs, the MEF DSII LL is driven by the public sector. It is operated by the public sector for the public sector. Although users are invited to co-create solutions, ultimately and intentionally, the public sector remains the primary beneficiary. The strategic aims of the MEF LL are in alignment with the Institution’s key objectives. Therefore, the Living Lab does not abide to set operational rules and its administrators are keen to explore potentially disruptive applications. The MEF LL employs a multi-methodological approach that is output oriented. It has flexible objectives that evolve to meet its changing needs. Since its recent inception, the MEF LL has produced tangible results by acting as a platform and co-creation space to facilitate:

  1. A co-creation space facilitating multi-stakeholders collaboration and knowledge sharing;
  2. Used as experimentation and usability tests to bolster digital innovation;

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The users that are invited to participate in activities at the MEF DSII LL have different profiles and demographic backgrounds. The answer to the question of “who” are the end-users in the co-creation session varies according to the session’s objectives. The users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the innovation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output. The MEF DSII LL utilizes the personas approach to profile the main distinctive features of the LL session participants. Regulatory and compliance, contract law, and technical/IT experts combined with the end user groups are some of the categories which are commonly involved in test experiments. The role and involvement of the users at the MEF DSII Living Lab is understood both as reactive informants as well as active co-creators (Dell’Era & Landoni, 2014). In the first use case (1), the users were involved in the MEF LL for implementation of top-down experiments, which are centered on the users and place users as the object of study. The MEF DSII ran a series of usability tests where the objective was to understand how a system should be used in order to produce optimal results. Different end users were asked: “Can you make sense of the tool? Did you experience any issues? Are there improvements needed for a user-friendly designed solution”? The project workers observed use of the products, identified problems and solutions with the engineers, and thought of ways to utilize different functionalities and properties of the IT system being studied. This methodology at the MEF DSII has proved successful when a technology/service relying on user feedback and acceptance has been tested. In such an occurrence, the MEF Living Lab allows collection, filtration, and transfer of all valuable end user ideas to the developers. In other co-creation sessions (2) stakeholders are called upon to participate in an interactive and empowering way, enabling them to become co-creators, and to go beyond user-centered approaches that only passively involve users. Partners are therefore identified with important consideration of active user involvement in order to determine who should be involved in the different innovation stages. Users, or customers, with different qualifications are included in the co-creation processes based on their suitability to achieve the expected output.

Co-creation process

The MEF LL approach strives for mutually beneficial outcomes based on the different project objectives. Overall, co-creation is understood as a form of 1) needs investigation and 2) as a tool to enhance productivity and stakeholder buy-in. MEF DSII LL’s focus is to have a physical location to invite other stakeholders and to support co-creation innovation. Co-creation activities are undertaken at the exploratory stage, where it is important to identify the needs and the “current state” of stakeholder interest as well as the operational background context. A preferred option to understand user needs is to prepare co-creation activities based on established definitions and understanding of the users and what they represent. This exercise translates into the definition of personas. These are fictional characters that represent specific types of customers. For instance, a persona could be “Marc – IT supplier.” Marc has a background in IT software development, has certain predefined personal and professional needs, he is introverted but has strong analytical skills. Persona examples are created based on preliminary investigation of the themes and common characteristics of the people that will take part of the co-creation sessions. This involves research to produce an overview of the current habits and practices of the targeted users. After understanding the user characteristics, one then engages in the process of discovering the latent needs and wants of the user. A specific focus is placed on the current problems they routinely face, taking into account the specific situations in which these problems occur. Here, sensitizing techniques are used to delve deeper into the users’ levels of knowledge – uncovering tacit and inherent needs and wants. This leads to the development of opportunities for the improvement of the users’ ‘current state.’ These materialize in possible ‘future states’ and originate from collective brainstorming, ideation, and co-creation techniques. Co-creation at the MEF DSII is also understood in terms of productivity. Despite the perception that deliberate and open discussion among all stakeholders may be time consuming, the real productivity gains resulting from co-creation exercises validate these nuanced methodologies.  During and after the co-creation sessions, there were positive outcomes from multi-stakeholder engagement. In fact, it became clear that the discussions organized inside the LL were settled faster and more smoothly simply by giving the opportunity to all the participants to work in a common space during a fix set of time.

Digital Transformation Process

To provide an example, in use case n° 1 of the Living Lab as a co-creation space facilitating multi-stakeholders collaboration and knowledge sharing we detail out the operations and outcomes of the Living Lab within the so-called “Cloudify NoiPA” project. The MEF DSII is undertaking a large project that, by 2020, aims to expand the number of public organisations it services to cover the entire Italian public administration staff. It is then paramount to involve the end users, which in this case are the other public organisations that currently depend on the payroll and HR services or are expected to do so in the near future, in the design process. The MEF DSII launched a series of multi-stakeholder co-creation sessions to collect their input. The involved participants were decision-makers from other public institutions (for example, representatives from the Italian police and the army). The goal was to collect their feedback on the functionality of the IT platform they use, including insight on what bugs, errors and other technological issues they would like to see improved and to better understand if their needs were being met. In this respect, the MEF DSII LL put into action a methodology for collecting user needs and produced a physical space that fostered different and varied forms of collaborative interaction to spur innovation. The overarching objective is to ensure that stakeholders from other public administrations buy into the programme. Ultimately, by strengthening their confidence in the process, stakeholders are more inclined to support the transformation programme throughout all phases of the “Cloudify NoiPA” project.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The MEF DSII experiments in semi-real life context and tests its products to collect feedback about usability issues. To provide an example, the MEF DSII has forgone some usability tests in advance of the launch of its updated webpage portal. This portal, on top of sharing informative material to the constituents about the MEF DSII activities, has a specific webpage devoted to “self-provisioning” services. The ”self-provisioning” services are a type of delivery mode that allow the MEF DSII to enlarge the user base of its public administration “clients” in a cost efficient manner. The local and regional public administrations can select, configure, and start services themselves in a cloud environment where they have access to download software from the web portal. Self-provisioning allows users to have rapid access to a customized infrastructure through a self-service portal, thereby limiting installation and maintenance costs, and avoiding costly procedures for requesting and approving new software. Thus, seamless functionality of the portal is critical for incentivizing adoption of the services and the wider buy-in from targeted stakeholders. The MEF DSII carried out usability tests on the portal by inviting a representative set of users to surf the web portal in the “observation room” (pictured on the right). The test subjects were then provided with a personal computer and were requested to navigate the portal by performing a selection of given tasks. In doing so, the users interacted with the test moderator in a consistent and measureable manner. The front line staff employed the “speak aloud method,” advising the users to say out loud what he/she thought were the main obstacles when processing the tasks. This was intentionally used to prevent participants from taking a reflexive approach where they say what they think they are supposed to say rather than their first impression. In fact, by proctoring the usability test in the separate “observation room,” the MEF DSII designers were able to effectively record the natural feelings and reactions of the participants. The metrics used for the web-portal user navigation assessment were, 1) Efficiency, 2) Efficacy, 3) Satisfaction, 4) Learning ease, 5) Memorisation ease, and 6) Error management. Technical tinkering enabled users to diagnose and fix bugs and optimize the customer experience with assistance from engineers and frontline employees.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Throughout the co-creation session, staff observed an initial resistance by the involved stakeholders when having to follow a certain structure and set of rules during discussions and negotiations. For some participants, embracing the discussion in a different way than conventional meeting styles made them hesitant, impatient, or dismissive. However, at the end of the co-creation session a collaborative behaviour emerged and participants gradually acted more like themselves. Seemingly less tangible, but still documented by participants during the co-creation session, was a heightened closeness with the other stakeholders. During the co-creation sessions users were more prone to finding a common ground with others and improved relationships proved to be a critical success factor. Ultimately, involvement and motivation in the process were both a pre-conditions to the co-creation session as well as a succeeding outcomes. Although involving users is only one factor among many that promotes co-creation in a LL, it is considered indispensable. Users at the MEF DSII LL were considered involved to the extent where their ideas were helping influence and develop others’ point of views. The success of such real-life collaboration, which aims to promote learning between different stakeholders, hinges on how the co-design process was orchestrated, facilitated, and managed.

Transferability & Replicability

The Living Lab is having an increasingly prominent role at the MEF DSII as Living Lab managers sponsor and promote its usage to external stakeholders. At the MEF DSII, front-end employees take over the role of coordinating the different groups of participants. They also establish and promote the emergence of close relationships between various participants. In this sense, MEF DSII Living Lab front-manager tasks and responsibilities go beyond the physical space of the Living Lab. Positive relationships outside of the lab preclude and guarantee successful co-creation sessions. For the MEF LL to be disruptive, strong alliances should be built with other stakeholders.

Success Factors

The public value and overall satisfaction generated from the MEF LL co-creation methodology is understood as a continuous and iterative value creation of services and products oriented for end users and prioritizes customer satisfaction. Initially a private consultancy provided co-designed and co-created solutions to the MEF DSII. In a context of contamination of approaches, the value seen in these methodologies in fulfilling customer satisfaction made the MEF DSII interested in establishing its own Living Lab at its own premises. This exemplifies the effect of contamination of approaches between private and public service offerings and delivery models crossing and blurring the differences. This is even more apparent in light of the shift, described in the New Public Management scientific literature, in how public services are increasingly inspired and managed according to private sector models. Public service providers are focusing on customer service and understand the centrality of the users as recipients of the services and holders of its public value.

Lessons learned

The Living Lab is having an increasingly prominent role at the MEF DSII as Living Lab managers sponsor and promote its usage to external stakeholders. At the MEF DSII, front-end employees take over the role of coordinating the different groups of participants. They also establish and promote the emergence of close relationships between various participants. In this sense, MEF DSII Living Lab front-manager tasks and responsibilities go beyond the physical space of the Living Lab. Positive relationships outside of the lab preclude and guarantee successful co-creation sessions. For the MEF LL to be disruptive, strong alliances should be built with other stakeholders. The facilitation of co-creation sessions requires competences which are highly contextual, anticipate the designer/manager needs and capabilities in stakeholder interactions and adjust to local settings. Due to the novelty of the MEF LL, there is still a need to hire a number of practitioners that possess the right skillsets in order to get the most out of the co-creation sessions. Attracting and retaining a broader range of practitioners that are trained in a varied set of methodologies such as co-design, co-implementation and co-assessment activities should be prioritized. Further, the stockpiling of institutional knowledge on User Research, Usability Testing, Design Thinking Workshop, Business Model Design, Change Management and Service Design is likely to produce skilfull judgments and facilitate meaningful interventions which are much needed.

Erasme Living Lab – Lyon Metropole: 20 years of Public Innovations

Created in 1999 as a multimedia centre in the countryside one hour west of the metropolitan area of Lyon (Rhône-Alpes Region), Erasme Living Lab became the Living Lab of Greater Lyon Metropole (the political institution that drives the urban area) in 2015, when Rhône department and Lyon Metropole merged. The management team were relocated in the centre of Lyon, the greater city of the region (1,3 millions inhabitants). Dedicated to digital culture since 1999, the ERASME missions were enlarged to smart city and the co-creation of new digital public services for inhabitants. Since 20 years, the Living Lab experimented different methods of open innovation with users on the one side and technological experts in various fields on the other. So, the Erasme team is specialized in collaborative workshops, service design, prototyping and digital technologies. Erasme is a tool for internal services of Lyon Metropole to rethink public services but the Living Lab has also a good reputation with diverse professional communities of the regional ecosystem and even at a national scale.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The transfer of the Living Lab from the countryside toward a metropole led to a new organization and the definition of 3 beneficiary targets. Erasme’s service offering is divided into three levels:
  • The first level concerns all digital projects carried by Lyon Metropole, with the Directorate of digital innovation and computer systems. Beneficiaries are the inhabitants that may be interested by a multiservice card or a better life in a smart city, for example.
  • The second level concerns diverse internal departments of Lyon Metropole for improving public services about child health, culture, transports, Public Service Houses, and so on.
  • The third level concerns the offer for external partners. It may be a municipality that seeks methodological support in the framework of a European programme. Or it may be private companies working for urban services, for example.

    • Co-creation process

    Since 1999, policy makers have imagined the Living Lab as a public service with a dedicated place and a team of experts in digital technologies at the service of local development. In this first stage (1999-2015), Erasme was used to work with museums (Muséolab programme) or teachers (ICT in education). When Erasme delocalized towards Lyon, in 2015, the Living Lab was at a mature stage with a strong experience. Since then, exhibitions are organized “outside the Lab” to mobilize inhabitants around some themes of public interest such as: culture, education, elder or poor people, smart city (urban regeneration, collective transport…). More than a Living Lab that mobilizes users to imagine new concepts or prototypes, Erasme claims to be a “Do Tank” to innovate and change urban life with digital technologies. The co-creation process is divided into two stages: the “Mix” and the “Lab”. This methodology has emerged from the long-term experience of the Living Lab since 1999.
  • The “Mix” is an event in which a specific place (museum, station, church, etc.) is “invested massively” by users for 2 or 3 days. It is a time to produce ideas and first prototypes but also a way for transforming organizations thanks to agile methods, collective intelligence and by creating contributive communities.
  • The “Lab” is a time for creating an innovative product or a digital service. Innovation requires a few weeks and sometimes several months for transforming prototypes into operational tools and services. Professional skills from diverse ecosystems are associated in neutral contexts and tests are realized in real life with end-users.

    • Digital Transformation Process

    Erasme Living Lab claims to be a “Use Laboratory” for the people and not a Lab dedicated to test digital technologies for new markets. Digital tools (software, device) are designed, prototyped, tested then developed in new technological device but to improve life of inhabitants in different public fields: culture, education, health, elderly, mobility and Smart City. The Living Lab mobilizes experts in culture and education but also in digital technologies, a mix of skills that creates a special alchemy to invent the museum of the future (Muséolab, Museomix, digital arts), digital workspaces for pupils, digital tools for aged people to keep in touch with their family, for example. The aim is to solve problems of inhabitants thanks to digital solutions but with a focus on public services, even if some innovations are developed with Start-ups or even with big firms of the region. More recently, Erasme Living Lab is working on the “SelfData project”, which makes it possible to invent services from citizens’ data while ensuring the security of the personal data beyond the requirements of the GDPR. Moreover, the “Grand Lyon Smart Data platform” (www.smartdata.grandlyon.com) makes it possible to co-create new urban services with users and private stakeholders. Lyon Metropole is also associated with the cities of Nantes and La Rochelle, in the west of France, to experiment the “Territorial SelfData”, a project launched with a national think tank called FING (New Generation Internet Federation) which is a leader in exploring the future of Internet and digital transition for people.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Co-creation workshops deal with four themes of public interest, which produced some services or products.
  • Culture (since 20 years): recent digital technologies were tested such as RFID, e-paper, Ubicomputing, Tangible interfaces, with the help of digital artists, in particular for a science and society museum (Musée des Confluences at Lyon).
  • Education (since 20 years): ICT education then e-learning environment for primary and secondary schools. The ENT (digital work environment) is open to teachers, pupils and their parents. Enriched year after year, it became a digital platform (laclasse.com).
  • Seniors e-care (since 2005): A tool (Webnapperon) was prototyped and tested with the elderly in retirement homes for dependent people. Improved in 2011 in the framework of a European project to co-design with 15 users, a service called “Host-communication” was implemented with open source software to create a social network between the elderly, often alone and far from their family.
  • Services for people in social difficulty have been a new field of experimentation for Erasme since 2015: The aim was to rethink the “Public Service Houses” of the Metropole in particular to welcome foreigners who do not speak French and do not know their social rights.
  • Smart city is also a recent field of experimentation: All citizens are end-users that can test new products or services, such as mobility with public transports.

    • Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Challenges originated in the creation of Erasme Living Lab by political decision: in 1999, a Senator interested in ICT and Internet decided to create a place to foster digital tools in cultural and educational fields, in particular in the countryside (his electoral constituency), where innovations are scarce. The transfer of Erasme towards Lyon in 2015 was also a political decision, to invent a smarter urban life but also to create a new administration with common goals after the merge of Lyon Metropole and the Rhône Department whose missions were different. Bottlenecks are diverse. First of all, the Living Lab is a “service of missions” which has to find budget for/thanks to new projects each year. The budget instability is a problem to follow more and more projects with a small team of managers. Young researchers or experts are sometimes recruited with a fixed-term contract thanks to the ERDF funds or other national or regional project funds but skills and competencies disappeared at the end of the contract. The lack of budget and its instability are also a problem to create a dedicated place for the Living Lab. Even if mobile workshops in the city are a good solution to attract citizens to the experimentations, a dedicated place is necessary for the development and innovation stage when professionals from diverse ecosystems have to meet and share their competencies.

    Transferability & Replicability

    Diffusion of innovations is important for Erasme. For example, prototypes of the Muséolab were diffused in museums, even at an international scale. The table Museo Touch is commercialized by a private firm. In education, the digital platform laclasse.com is used by more and more educative institutions in France. As Erasme is the oldest Living Lab in France, the question of replicability is very important for the management team. As Erasme belongs to different networks, at a local, national or even European scale, the co-creation model called “the Mix” was experimented elsewhere. Moreover, the reputation of the Erasme team generates solicitations from other geographical areas, even from around the world for the ”Museum of the Future”. Internationally, Erasme is registered in networks such as the Arts Sciences Network, Enoll (in 2010) or EUROCITIES (from 2017). Nevertheless, as Erasme claims a value creation in the service of general interest, transferability of the co-creative approach (Mix, Lab) is not easy with economic ecosystems in the region. But the theme of Smart City opens the partnership to businesses even if big firms are not used to open innovation, open source or Creative Commons License. Once they agreed with these principles, big firms use Erasme as a training centre to co-creation methods for their own employees. Barriers to co-creation are step by step transformed in a way to diffuse co-creation methods in the economic ecosystem of Lyon urban region. The future creation of an “Augmented Third-Place for Urban Worlds” (Smart City, Smart Territory) by a collaboration with another Living Lab in Lyon (TUBÀ), the university and other institutions, is the result of the Erasme reputation acquired step by step since 20 years.

    Success Factors

    The success of Erasme Living Lab depends on diverse factors.
    • The management team is composed of engineers, designers, developers, makers who are familiar with open innovation methods, animation and project management. They share competencies with diverse creative and professional communities, all experts in a specific field (culture, education, technology, health…) at a local, regional or even national and international scales.
    • Established step by step during 20 years, the methodology of co-creation with users and stakeholders is proven: a first phase of “Mix” with users (from ideation to prototypes); a second phase of “Lab” with professionals and users (from prototypes to tests then development of an innovative product or service).
    • Education to the “right to fail” through a communication about “lessons from experience”. Because failures can be a source of value rather than a barrier to co-creation.
    • A Living Lab approach “out of the walls”, in public spaces with citizens rather than in a dedicated place, is a way to promote co-creation to the general public, digital artists or social innovators. But a dedicated place “as neutral as possible” is better for associating professional ecosystems such as big firms, creative start-ups or higher education institutions (design, digital coding, urban planning…).
    • Thanks to its 20 years of seniority, Erasme Living Lab is well identified by the metropolitan ecosystem, and even beyond the region.

    Lessons learned

    For the managers of Erasme, many Living Labs look more like Think Tanks. Erasme claims to be a “Do Tank” because the management team has the will to “make” without being so far a Fab Lab. Erasme is actually relying on existing Fab Labs to make some prototypes. End-users are invited to the co-creation process but at specific moments: 1) upstream in the ideation phase (one or two days) and the rapid prototyping phase (10 days); 2) downstream to test the prototypes. Between these two stages, time (several weeks even months) is given to private and public stakeholders for the development phase (further prototyping, tests, returns and iterations) of innovations that can be put on the market (diffusion phase). To be efficient during theses different stages, the Living Lab need a management team for maintaining a clear purpose (production of solutions and not only concepts and prototypes) and for offering a methodological accompaniment to users and stakeholders. But the respect of freedom in a “neutral” space or place is necessary in order to foster creativity, the emergence of disruptive ideas, and agility necessary for prototyping out of usual operating constraints. Paid professionals are a necessity to mobilize experts in the development phase, to be able to cross technical competences with artistic skills in dedicated domains (education, culture, health, smart city…). But the number of professionals have to be limited to maintain proximity among the stakeholders when it is necessary to obtain a consensus about the final product.

    Plan FP+E

    The Plan FP+E case study describes the Public Service Innovation Network for Social Innovation (PSINSI) that created the current Plan for Professional Education and Employment 2016-2019 in La Rioja region (Spain). The plan has guided the development of skills, the active employment policy, the integration and coordination of the available resources and the interrelations between the different subsystems and modes to actually produce employment for young people in La Rioja.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    Stakeholders include:
    • Consejería de Educación, Formación y Empleo (the Department of Education, Training and Employment)
    • The unions (UGT, CCOO)
    • The regional association of enterprises (FER)
    • Other relevant social stakeholders in the region (Asociación Promotora de personas con Discapacidad intelectual Adultas, ASPRODEMA, Consejo Estatal de Representantes de Minusválidos, CERMI, and the political parties)
    Beneficiaries include:
    • The citizens of La Rioja

    Co-creation process

    This was a project that aimed at providing citizens with services, co-designed and co-produced with them (through the unions and most representative companies’ association in the region). This is demonstrated in the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (out of 6) objectives stated by the working group for this Plan: (2) To set specific priority objectives in terms of PE and employment to guide the development of skills through-out space and time along the current office term, and promote them among citizens. (3) To lead the strategic approach of all the actors involved in PE and active employment policy in La Rioja, seeking to link their actions to the proposed objectives. (4) To integrate and coordinate the available resources in terms of PE and employability, both in the educational and employment markets, so that they support the objectives more effectively and efficiently. (5) To improve the interrelation between the different PE-providing subsystems and modes and, essentially, between all of them and actual employment. A greater involvement of the regional production system is essential. (6) To reach the highest degree of consensus in the formulation of the Plan from the technical, social and political points of view, so that public and private actions are mainly oriented towards shared strategic objectives.

    Digital Transformation Process

    Not applicable.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    The general guidelines that grouped the results of this project aimed at improving employment qualification of human resources were:
    • To reduce structural unemployment and to promote employment of quality;
    • To achieve a qualified active population through lifelong learning;
    • To improve the quality and results of education and training systems at all levels;
    • To promote social inclusion and to alleviate poverty reinforcing social protection systems, lifelong learning and active and comprehensive inclusion policies, with special attention to women.
    Additionally, the EU 2020 Strategy helped identify other results along the objective of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth:
    • Smart growth, through the development of an economy based on knowledge and innovation;
    • Sustainable growth, by promoting an economy that uses resources more efficiently, that is green and more competitive;
    • Inclusive growth, through the promotion of an economy with a high level of employment that results in economic, social and territorial cohesion.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Regarding R&D and innovation investment, La Rioja presented certain weaknesses. According to Eurostat data, it reaches 0.87% of regional GDP. This is lower than the national average (1.33%) or that of the European Union (2.02%) and far from the 3% target of the Europe 2020 Strategy. La Rioja had 23,083 companies in 2015. Out of the total, 99.92% were companies without employees, micro-enterprises and SMEs. More than 50% of business units do not have salaried workers (12,314, according to the latest published statistics). This atomization is also reflected in the fact that most of the companies in the region are legally formed as solo-corporations or freelances. Likely, this bears an individualization effort to promote and engage these individuals into employment and training policy.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The Plan FP+E is a complex strategical project. Our selection of this case is justified as an example of the tremendous impact that PSINSIs may have in all sorts of public sector initiatives. In this case, a strategic plan for a social issue of major relevance such as unemployment and your professional education was handled with such a type of network. What surprised us from this case, beyond the formation of the network itself, is the publicity and openness of the initiative. It is true that it was subject to criticism, but the Working Group developments and final version of the plan was publicly and easily available from the regional government website. Moreover, the sessions of the Working Group, being a heterogeneous group including less qualified organisations, or certainly, not used to develop strategic political and operational plans, must have been rather complex to coordinate. Still, using the European, Spanish and earlier regional mandates and frameworks, they put together a complex plan that includes not only young people entering the labour market, but also long-term unemployed, disabled people, and those willing to re-qualify to improve their employability.

    Success Factors

    One of the major drivers for this Plan FP+E is the willingness of all economic actors to regain the competitiveness of the economy of La Rioja. Even along the economic crisis of the 2008-2013, the greater weight of the secondary sector justified that the economy of La Rioja was more productive than the Spanish economy. Measured through the relationship between GDP and the number of hours worked, La Rioja’s productivity was 36.37 in 2012, compared to 34.75 in Spain as a whole (Regional Accounting, Base 2008, INE). Another decisive driver of this Plan was the (EU) 2015/1848 Decision of the Council (October 5, 2015) on the guidelines for the employment policies of the member states for 2015. It set the following guidelines in terms of employment within the EU:
  • Boost the demand for labour.
  • Improve the job offer, qualifications and skills.
  • Improve the functioning of labour markets.
  • Promote social integration, fight poverty and promote equal opportunities.

    • Lessons learned

    The 3rd Plan for Professional Education and Employment (Plan FP+E: Plan de Formación Profesional y Empleo of La Rioja) for the 2016-2019 office term represented an effort towards facilitating access to employment of the citizens of La Rioja, a region in the central northern Spain, World-famous for its wines, shoes and agriculture. The new federal government of La Rioja soon declared the care for its youth and unemployed a priority of its policies and public actions. And it embarked in a new plan towards improving professional education and employment in the region. This initiative was led by the Consejería de Educación, Formación y Empleo (the regional Department of Education, Training and Employment) and was the result of a very close temporal collaboration with the most representative unions (UGT, CCOO), enterprise association (FER) and other relevant social stakeholders in the region. Together, they built a Working Group to design and implement a new plan for professional education (PE) and employment for the 2016-2019 term. This has been a project then that can be associated with the new public governance paradigm (NPG) paradigm, and fits into the public sector innovation networks for social innovation. Besides the specific context described earlier, there have been several news concerning the implementation of the Plan FP+E since its inception. Maybe the most relevant is that the Spanish Court of Auditors, in its evaluation of the different instruments for employment policies in La Rioja, 2016 has observed a degree of implementation of the objectives of the Annual Employment Policy Plan higher than the average of the Autonomous Communities. In the case of Plan FP+E though, there is an absence of an evaluation. Also, some criticism from the political opposition publicised the plan was delayed in some of its proposals.

    The Spanish General Secretary for Digital Administration

    The General Secretary for Digital Administration offers the best case study in Spain for approaching value co-creation in the field of digital transformation, as it is the digital service team from central government in charge of national leadership and coordination. Fourteen head of Units and project managers of some of the most relevant projects have been selected to share their experience and opinions regarding co-creation of value in their area. In particular, they have been asked about their organisation, the most relevant project in which they have worked, other actors involved in those projects, recurring challenges, involvement of public servants, citizens and other stakeholders in their projects, replication of practices across levels of government, public value creation and the future of digital transformation.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    Stakeholders and Beneficiaries include:
    • Civil servants
    • Other national, regional and local public administration
    • Associations, representatives and intermediaries
    • Citizens as final users and professionals
    • Businesses and third sector associations

    Co-creation process

    Civil servants, citizens, business, intermediaries and other stakeholders participate during the whole cycle of creation of value. For example, when thinking about the projects launched to create some of the most relevant services nowadays, it was clear that the voice of the large number of stakeholders was collected and taken into account. It is worth noting that direct participation is not the most relevant way of co-creating value, the role of the intermediaries and external evaluation plays a central role. The main barrier to involve citizens in the early stages of the development of a project is the lack of an interlocutor. The administration usually collaborates with citizens when they are part of an association or a civil society cluster. It is especially during the legislative reform and the evaluation phases that the opinion of citizens, public servants and other stakeholders is gathered and taken to the continual improvement process. Nonetheless, efforts have been done during the last years to create spaces for collaboration. For example, the current administrative laws include some steps in which collecting the opinion of stakeholders is a legal requirement for their publication. Also, formal groups have been created within the governance structure which meet often to share opinions regarding digital transformation. During the phase of evaluation, the feedback of the stakeholders is the main indicator of the success of the service. In the case of the coordination between different administrations and different administration levels, formal working groups with the participation of the CIOs and other managers are arranged and some of them are even regulated by law. This multiple structure of collaboration and cooperation is deemed necessary because of the complexity of the territorial model and of the administration.

    Digital Transformation Process

    The provision of digital public services in Spain involves multiple actors, different in their powers and interactions amongst them. Even though there is a basic legal framework that applies for all the national territory, there are different competencies that result in the fact that strategies, legislation and public services are not unique Spain. The Law 11/2007 recognised citizens’ right to use electronic means in their relations with public administration. Afterwards, two new administrative laws integrated eGovernment into its core. These established the citizens’ right to communicate via an electronic channel with the public administrations and the obligation of the public administrations to use electronic means in their communications. Alongside, it was created the figure of the CIO of the Public Administration of the State, in charge of promoting the digital transformation process and the coordination with other administrations and with the European Union, together with the General Secretary for Digital Administration. One example. A relevant success case about co-creating value in digital administration is in the selection of the non-working days for notifications in the Tax Agency. Citizens, businesses and the public administration are able to enjoy a complete vacation period without problems derived from failed notifications, with the corresponding improvement in management. The quality of the service of the Tax Agency has been improved when taking into account massive feedback from all stakeholders.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    • Improvement of user-centricity, accessibility and quality of digital public services.
    • Satisfaction of the final user.
    • Reduction of the average time of processing of the administrative procedure.
    • Reduction of the development cost of the digital public services.
    • Reduction of fraud and increase of revenue.
    • Transparency and openness.
    • Better skills for digital transformation among civil servers and the civil society.
    • Improvement of knowledge about the public administration among citizens and other stakeholders.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Interviewees identified an attitude of risk aversion among the public servants, as a consequence of fear to possible negative outcomes. Some interviewees declare that the coordination of a large number of stakeholders of different nature required a lot of effort, both with other administrations and with the private sector. Technical challenges have been identified, such as the use of some services by a large number of users complying with the requirements of availability, together with the digital divide, which complicated the adoption of some projects by all users and made it necessary to give several alternatives for the different groups of users. Other challenges are in changes in the direction of the project and varying degrees of support through time. It was also noted that the resistance to the projects was often against the way and the conditions of implementation and not against digital transformation. Starting the projects with quick-wins or clear advantages from the beginning can help to advantages and benefits to be noted from the beginning. In some of the more complex services, training and appropriate technological equipment has been necessary. It is needed an especial effort in training a deployment of technological equipment for its success. In the case of public servants who are involved in the design and operation of the projects, it is important to value and reward the whole team in the case of success, so that they feel co-responsible in future digital transformation projects. It has been identified in the surveys that the resistance to change among civil servants and ICT experts often comes from previous projects which were not successful.

    Transferability & Replicability

    There is a culture of cooperation and coordination among administrations, implemented through technical committees and working groups with representatives from the state administration, the regions and the municipalities. In the surveys, all of the interviewees from the Digital Secretariat for Public Administration declared that the source code of the digital services they were responsible for was published. Cloud computing is particularly relevant, as it allows this segment of users to access services without the need of meeting specific requirements in terms of infrastructure, budget or human resources. The current model is usually based on offering the service on the cloud to the final administrative user without a payment, as a policy to increase the use of digital services among small administrations. This model was preferred by most of the interviewees. The Law 39/2015, of the Common Administrative Procedure, establishes that regional administrations must reuse the common digital services unless otherwise justified in terms of efficiency. This helps the smaller municipalities to adopt digital transformation services, being usability crucial for the success of the project.

    Success Factors

    • Participation of stakeholders should avoid one-size-fits-all strategies; idiosyncrasy matters and as well as the nature of the service, project, sector and type of users.
    • Prioritisation is essential as well as fast interactions along the value co-creation life cycle.
    • Moving from service offering model to on-demand model.
    • Key issues for involvement of stakeholders: dedication, selection, competences, awareness.
    • Less bureaucracy, direct on-line relationships and closeness to the citizens and other stakeholders.
    • Starting the projects with quick-wins or clear advantages from the beginning, so the advantages and benefits can be noted from the beginning.
    • In the case of public servants who are involved in the design and operation of the projects, it is important to value and reward the whole team in the case of success, so that they feel co-responsible in future digital transformation projects.

    Lessons learned

    The main conclusion of this report is that co-creation of value is a reality in the public sector of Spain. Direct participation is not the most relevant way of co-creating value, the role of the intermediaries and external evaluation plays a central role. Statistics of use as an indicator of the success and importance of a digital public service are regarded as a central piece. This study has identified some challenges regarding co-creation of value. It is necessary to improve the digital skills of citizens and other stakeholders in order to encourage their participation in the creation of value in digital transformation. It was identified that some of the services are not known by some of the segments of potential users and this reduces the success of the project. The organisation of the different stakeholders, their dedication and implication in the administrative affairs is very unequal and for that reason the co-creation of value could favour some stakeholders against others. It was declared by most of the interviewees that an improvement of the digital skills of the Spanish society would help to increase the quality introduced in the projects by the external stakeholders. It was a general opinion collected in the interviews that, by working further on the topic of co-creation of value, public administration will be able not only to be transparent and improve their accountability, but it will be possible to deliver services of a higher quality, user centric and which give a better response to the necessities of the society.

    Anonymous – An internal innovation and quality unit in a middle-sized municipality

    The unit has two main focal areas; quality assurance and innovation; the former is seen as ensuring order and securing the quality of service offerings, whereas the latter is understood as experimental and risk-driven. The case study has taken to innovation unit as point of departure: The main activities of the innovation unit are; to mature the whole organisation in regards to an innovative mindset, to disseminate and share knowledge externally, to monitor projects as either project initiator, project lead or as sparring partners and to manage a yearly innovation fund. Both public (that is, from within the municipality itself), private and civil actors can apply for project money via the fund as long as the projects are finalised within a year.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    Key stakeholders are the internal functions in the municipality, private sector organisations and, despite to a lesser extent, academia. Beneficiaries are both elderly citizens and care takers.

    Co-creation process

    The unit is based on the logic of living labs – understood as a certain innovation methodology.  From the perspective of the municipality, this living lab approach is seen as a platform where especially external actors can get an entry to collaborate with the public sector and herein access target groups, such as elderly that they could not otherwise have approached. Hence, most innovation processes are inherently co-creational since citizens, users and employees across sectors are engaged. Mostly, and across types of projects, the unit is primary lead regarding the research design, which is based on traditional user studies e.g. citizens interviews in their private homes or at care centres and public servant interviews and feedback, whereas the experimental aspects of living labs are enacted as test set-ups in homes and care centres – which seems to be part of most projects. In the projects the initial phase is considered crucial, which is why the unit emphasises how idea generation and herein reality checking need to involve various actors. This way they want to ensure that perspectives and input from the ones who are going to enact the solutions, and hence make the solutions live in the organisation, have been part of the development processes. Thus, even though the projects are inclusive processes with different stakeholders collaborating during the projects, and not necessarily with a dominant partner, the municipality is the sole decision-maker regarding the outcome of the processes.

    Digital Transformation Process

    There has been an outspoken focus on welfare technology, as both a means to make the citizens more self-reliant and as a way to address that there might be fewer employees in the sector prospectively (the idea is to replace all the work routines that do not imply human interaction with technological solutions). But despite the unit’s focus on technological development, it is emphasised that technology is not solely a solution in itself, but that the organisational change that might follow, be that cultural and/or procedural, is key.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    All projects should create value by addressing the following three bottom lines: increased quality for the citizens, better work environment to employees and value creation for the organisation – as either money or resource savings or increased efficiency or quality. These are the three main success criteria written into all projects, but they do not need to be fulfilled equally or have the same weighing in all projects. Besides the three bottom lines, it is emphasised that the activities of the innovation unit, and the municipality in general, hopefully support community building by creating new jobs and making it attractive to live in the region. Also, the overall societal challenge of more elderly and a reduced work force is understood as a concern and a responsibility that reaches beyond the single projects.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Barriers to conducting co-creation processes for innovation are both internal and external. Internally, the on-going focus on resources makes it important to the unit to be able to argue for spending time and money on the specific projects carried out. Externally, the collaboration between a huge public sector organisation with 6000 employees based on political leadership and e.g. a small one to two persons company is sometimes challenging – basically due to profoundly different work processes.

    Transferability & Replicability

    An important dimension regarding the value of a project is the ability to spread and disseminate the outcome, be that technology implementation or work processes. On the one hand, the innovation unit has been able to create a demand within the organisation and in the entire administration, which was not there from the beginning. But on the other hand, it is also recognised that change does not happen by itself and that both knowledge sharing and implementation can be a huge challenge, even though it is within the same organisation. Moreover, there is a focus on spreading in a wider sense not bound to the local context of the municipality; to other municipalities in Denmark and internationally. The reasoning behind is that if the unit is able to share best practices, hopefully they will also receive ideas and inspiration from the outside – and as such upscale both the solutions and the approach to innovation.

    Success Factors

    Increased quality of life for elderly citizen.

    Lessons learned

    To the innovation unit, the term and the initiatives that living labs comprise legitimise the municipality as a matchmaker between and translator of public and private sector logics. Moreover, it is revealed that living lab both refers to and enables a certain discourse and a sort of organising – making the perceived strength of the living lab concept – that it is a signifier – open towards a variety of interpretations without influencing the shared experience among the actors involved; that the collaboration is highly meaningful.

    Bybi – Citybee

    Bybi is a social enterprise and association that enables co-production of honey by renting beehives to public, private, and social organisations in the city of Copenhagen. Bybi is in charge of processing and selling the honey produced by these rented beehives, and moreover Bybi conducts beekeeping and honey production courses in both the collaborating and other organisations, such as schools and non-profit housing organisations. The association is founded on an urge to find a model of production that contributes to a richer environment and inclusive communities.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    Key stakeholders are the companies and organisations that rent beehives and the municipality of Copenhagen. Beneficiaries can be understood as both the employees of Bybi, but also the customers of the honey products.

    Co-creation process

    The production of honey is inherently based on a co-creation process; Bybi-employees work closely together with the employees from the different organisations, and when customers buy Bybi products they also receive seeds to plant – to ensure biodiversity for bees.

    Digital Transformation Process

    No digital transformation process is going on.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Some of the people who work at Bybi are at the edge of the labour market. However, they are not treated as people that need to be re-integrated into the labour market, since the outset is that all people contribute to society. Hence Bybi aims to build an inclusive community of people with a shared vision of bees and honey production.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    There are some challenges related to communication, that is, to communicate what the company is all about and that it takes time to communicate identity. Another type of challenge is related to the ambitions of turning a factory on its head making space for consumers to act as co-producers – but it can also be understood as a driver, since it triggers an urge to find new ways and solutions.

    Transferability & Replicability

    Still, Bybi only exists in Copenhagen, but the idea and form of organisation are not limited to this context.

    Success Factors

    The objective of Bybi is to change humans from passive consumers into active co-producers of a richer natural environment and a more inclusive society. More concretely, Bybi’s influence can be described with regard to areas where Bybi has potential contributions: Creating opportunities for people to contribute to society, improving the experience of the environment, helping organisations to carry out CSR strategies and turning the factory on its head.

    Lessons learned

    Bybi grows out of social economy, but is confronting a wider societal and public problem of transforming the labour market and enriching the environment. It argues that this goes far beyond the Danish system of social enterprises. Hence Bybi is more an institutional entrepreneur than a social entrepreneur aiming to reconfigure relationships between labour and pleasure, production and co-production, humans and non-humans and consumption and production.

    Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)

    The organisation Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) is organising and facilitating development projects for young boys, between the age of 13 and 19, from marginalised housing areas. The program is centred around entrepreneurship and, in cooperation with voluntary venture pilots from civil society and business partners, the young boys are given the opportunity to start their own micro-enterprise. The philosophy behind MYOB is that the program further develops the professional and social competencies of the young boys and thereby enables a stronger association to the educational system and the job market.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    To be able to operate, Mind Your Own Business relies on a well-developed network of volunteers, mentor companies, non-profit housing associations, and public sector collaborators. The program is based on external funding. The main beneficiaries are the youngsters who participate in the program.

    Co-creation process

    Internally the program relies on a form of organising where there is no specific owner of the process and hence decision-making is made jointly among the actors involved – MYOB employees are solely acting as facilitators. A such, the program is itself based on a logic of co-creation.

    Digital Transformation Process

    No digital transformation process is going on.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    To MYOB, the overall aim of the program is personal development of the boys, based on the understanding that the competences they gain from participating can be transferred to other contexts and hence increase their social and professional abilities, also prospectively.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    Historically, the main barriers are related both to the internal and the external environment of the program. Internally the boys are struggling with both low support and understanding from their families and with the acceptability from the other boys in their neighbourhood. Externally the adult lack of confidence in the competences and abilities of the boys is leading to mistrust.  Hence, a barrier is to change the ‘outside’ story of the boys. Nevertheless, these barriers seem to decrease both during the course of a program and since the success stories of the program are now spreading.

    Transferability & Replicability

    At the moment the program is starting out in Greenland, and despite the need to develop and tailor the process to a new context the main idea does not seem difficult to transfer.

    Success Factors

    The process and the learning of the boys in the program are the main success criteria, but also there is an awareness that, from the perspective of the boys, an important success criterion is related to the micro-enterprises – the aspect of entrepreneurship is crucial for the boys to become engaged.

    Lessons learned

    MYOB is based on a planned network to function. As such the relationship building, and hence trust among actors, has been key in developing a functional network that over time can be seen as innovative cross-sectorial collaboration. The innovation network is bottom-up, since it is founded on an entrepreneurial initiative and still relies heavily on releasing local resources. Nevertheless, the network was from the outset conditioned by having an existing and recognised platform to develop from and still it is dependent on MYOB as ‘system integrator’ in realisation of the MYOB programme.

    Grennesminde

    Grennessminde is a foundation based on trust ownership, with a declared social economic focus. At the outset the foundation is targeting (mainly) young people with special needs through education, job training and residential accommodation. Around this main aim the foundation runs a number of social enterprises, initiates leisure activities and is engaged in diverse collaborations across sectors.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    The foundation mainly relies on income as a subcontractor to the public sector, offering education within the ‘special planned youth education programme’, thus a key stakeholder is the municipalities using the program. Other stakeholders are the customers of the social enterprises and other organisations that are part of Grennesminde’s network. The key beneficiaries are the  young people, but to some extent also the municipality, since Grennesminde as subcontractor offers a public service.

    Co-creation process

    The way Grennesminde functions today is based on a development process initiated by a change in legislation that the organization needed to respond to. Hence co-creation of the public service has developed over time, both due to systemic changes and due to a hiring process focusing on recruiting candidates with a business mindset.

    Digital Transformation Process

    No digital transformation process is going on.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    Despite being evaluated upon the measurement and quality criteria in the formalised inspections, the managers of Grennessminde furthermore distinguish between impact at a micro or macro level. At a micro level, the managers stress all the little success experiences during the everyday life at Grennessminde. At a macro level, the success is also understood as two-fold. On the one hand it is to support or trigger a cultural change in the municipalities where the employees (as representatives of the system) meet the youngster with respect and in this manner open up the doors of the system. On the other hand, it is believed a success criterion to push and actively engage in the debate on social economy in Denmark.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    A main driver that eases collaboration is clear expectations from the municipalities, transparency in the referral and assessment process, and trust from stakeholders and partners.  In opposition, a key challenge has to do with navigating in diverse realities with different quality parameters; the public sector and the third sector. Also, the aspect of clashing logics is also mirrored in structural settings, where it becomes hard to operate and change practices due to municipal silos and silo thinking. This can e.g. be between different administrative bodies or between different groups of professionals.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The case in itself is not easy transferable, but the idea of establishing work integrated social enterprises is not new, and as such the case can be an illustrative example.

    Success Factors

    The overall aim of Grennessminde is to create a meaningful life for young people with special needs. To be part of the job market is perceived key in this regard, which is why Grennessminde supports the development of their social and collegial skills. Hence the value lies in the experience of the youngsters as being important relative to colleagues and their job function. Thus, the success is not measured in people getting a job, but rather in empowering the young people.

    Lessons learned

    An overall challenge regarding the understanding of success criteria and measurements is that, in Grennessminde’s view, most municipalities focus on the degree of youngsters that have entered the job market – despite not being able to undertake ordinary jobs. A circumstance, which is especially in a long-term perspective hard to identify, since it is illegal to keep civil registration numbers and hence Grennessminde cannot know, or show, how the young people are doing after e.g. a two years period. Therefore, Grennessminde urges the municipalities to make as specific measurement parameters as possible, while the youngsters are at Grennessminde, e.g. to be able to do a bus ride alone and hence support that the youngsters become ready for the job market – whether as an employee at Grennessminde or at another work place.

    “Cycling Without Age” (CWA)

    Cycling Without Age is a foundation that was established in Denmark 2015, but is now represented in 47 countries.

    The main idea is that elderly people living in care centres or elderly people offered home care are given the opportunity to get a bike ride in a trishaw. The trip involves what is referred to as the three P’s: pilots, passengers and personnel. The pilot (driver) is either a volunteer or an employee from the care centre or home care, the passenger is the elderly person and personnel refer to the employees and/or administration at the care centre/home care. The main objective of Cycling Without Age is presented as giving the elderly the right to wind in the hair by ensuring mobility and active partaking in society.

    Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

    A key stakeholder in a Danish context is the municipality, and more specifically the managers and employees at care centres and home care. The service of the bike ride cannot be outlived without these. Another key stakeholder is thus the politicians, who have been part of pushing the idea forward. Besides the public sector stakeholders, a key actor is the volunteers and the beneficiaries are the elderly.

    Co-creation process

    The idea and the service of getting a bike ride is not the outcome of co-creation, understood as deliberative innovation processes. Anyhow the idea has been developed and tailored to countries outside Denmark, where the public sector is not the main provider of elderly care.

    Digital Transformation Process

    CWA offers a digital booking platform, but the interviews revealed that for some care centres it was easier to use a manual calendar. And in the cases using the platform, it is not transforming practices and procedures.

    Results, Outcomes & Impacts

    It is difficult to highlight specific results and outcomes of the bike ride in itself (see success criteria), but the success of CWA as a foundation and the many countries that now also offer bike rides for elderly can be seen as evidence for impact regarding the service/idea.

    Challenges & Bottlenecks

    The public managers stress that fiery souls are key when it comes to implementing the initiative – either positioned in the administration or within elderly care, and these need managerial back-up. Another barrier relates to the operation of CWA. The public managers tell how they are left alone with the initiative after the implementation phase. This experience is both related to the awareness from the municipality and from the CWA secretariat. To exemplify, it is the responsibility of the care centre/home care to maintain the trishaws and they are not granted any funding for repairing or buying new bicycles if they are damaged.

    Transferability & Replicability

    The initiative has been easily transferred to municipalities in Denmark and to other settings internationally.

    Success Factors

    The impact of the initiative  is not perceived by CWA and public managers in traditional quantitative metrics but rather in qualitative aspects, such as the general enhancement of the joy of life among the elderly. Another positive aspect of the visibility of the elderly in the local community is an increased awareness of elderly, dementia etc. among citizens in general. Still, CWA is working on more concrete evaluation criteria to professionalise and legitimise the bike ride as a method and an approach to increased life quality among the elderly.

    Lessons learned

    The case of CWA is interesting due to the high degree of positivity that surrounds the movement. The initiative and the foundation do not seem to meet a lot of resistance concerning the cause per se; to ensure that elderly stay mobile and part of society. Thus, it seems that if the cause is perceived highly legitimate the room for manoeuvre increases. Externally, since it becomes easier to engage in strategic collaborations and to recruit volunteers, and internally because the organization, based on trust in their own raison d’être and main objective, becomes flexible in regards to development and organizing, as long as the main objective stays the same. Another key aspect is how the innovation is positioned in the eco-system of public elderly care services. CWA is mainly an add-on to formal elderly care, since the foundation does not overtake tasks or roles of the public sector. In this manner they are not subject to competition regarding resources and legitimacy, making it less problematic for the municipalities to engage in collaboration.