The PwC Experience Center

Development and technological innovation are changing the way people live and especially work. In 2015, to accommodate this shift, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) launched its first Experience Center in Hallandale, FL to serve as a space where collaborative, dynamic, and user-oriented business models could be developed and tested – ultimately helping bring together diverse stakeholders for innovative, multi-perspective solutions.

Since 2015, PwC expanded its Experience Center unit and now employs 3,000 people across 50 Centers and 5 key European hubs to support private and public industry as they evolve to meet the changing needs of their customers. At their core, the PwC Experience Centers promote iterative, user-centric problem solving strategies and their staff facilitate essential and transformative client interactions throughout project design stages. The Centers function as independent intermediaries where PwC can reach non-traditional clientele and experiment with participatory design processes. Further, its operations are dual-purposed as PwC Experience Center staff advises internally and externally – supporting PwC consultants while also offering services to outside clientele.

PwC advances several initiatives at its Experience Centers including, application of Design Thinking in workshop settings, product/service usability testing for clients, and trainings for how to implement the Centers’ agile and responsive on-demand approaches. In addition to consulting on local projects across sectors, the PwC Experience Centers allow critical exchange of information and produce crosscutting connections, thereby enabling an innovative PwC-wide network of service offerings.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

There are several examples where PwC Experience Centers engaged multi-stakeholders and served as platforms where users/citizens could express their needs and wants of certain products/services. In the Lombardy case, for instance, in addition to the co-creation session PwC helped organize a call-for-feedback session, where Lombardy citizens were able to submit their opinions on the new public portal. Through this process, the Regione Lombardia could collect responses and better understand the fundamental issues of the application based on the user experiences. Another example, the Meet Sweden project pioneered by the PwC Stockholm Experience Center in partnership Swedish Industrial Design Foundation (SVID) and Swedish public agencies, highlights how the public sector is growing increasingly interested in the role of users/citizens in service model development. Asylum seekers in Sweden often struggle with long and arduous processes when trying to resettle and legally immigrate to Sweden. Information is lost between multiple visits to disjointed public organizations and refugees does not feel in control of their own asylum journey. To remedy some of these issues, PwC Stockholm brought together private and public actors as well as the migrants themselves at the Experience Center to participate in co-creation sessions and generate human-centric solutions. Assessing the needs of the migrants was essential when developing the layout and in-app design features in the Meet Sweden mobile application. As a result, the participants jointly created a new mobile application that streamlines the asylum process and saves time, money, and energy of all involved actors. This is just one project where livelihoods were improved based on co-creation design thinking and it exposes the potentialities of Experience Centers in enhancing public service delivery models.

Co-creation process

Through iterative activities at the Centers, including group brainstorming in the Sandbox rooms, usability tests of company products and design thinking exercises, PwC works jointly with the public sector, its providers and the citizens to develop approaches that align with the above pillars. PwC intentionally outfits each Experience Center with adjustable, client-friendly workspaces and focuses on developing efficient and agile solutions. While Centers in every country belonging to the PwC network abide to a shared set of methodologies and approaches, each has its own focus and peculiarities. PwC structures each physical space differently to match regional and cultural characteristics. One example is the PwC Rome Experience Center. Inside the Center, there are flexible spaces with adjustable walls and moveable tables to accommodate activities organized for and with clients. It has a work café with objects of Italian design to create a familiar environment conducive to make people unwind and spur a positive ideation and reflection process. Additionally, the interactive technology and writeable walls incorporated in the central Sandbox meeting room offer clients unique spaces for meetings, workshops, and trainings with PwC UX design and technology professionals. The Testing Lab and Observatory Room include a unidirectional mirror so clients can carry out usability tests and observe real time client reactions to services/products. The Rome Experience Center also has AI technology, 3D printing, and contemporary digital programming to collaborate with clients in the development of prototypes.

Digital Transformation Process

Scholars envision Living Labs as the generators of concrete, tangible innovations based on contributions from users and communities, rather than just simply functioning as brainstorming spaces. The PwC Experience Centers propel forward several iterations of innovation by recruiting diverse job profiles, applying co-creation methodologies, and prioritizing the human experience in all project designs. Dynamism and functionality are consistent features across all PwC Experience Centers and this allows innovation to manifest in a variety of ways at different stages in the development process. Namely, we will detail out how the Experience Centers incite business model innovation for its public sector clients, and how they understand service/product and touch point innovation throughout the design process. Innovation is transient across levels and, at PwC Experience Centers; it is contingent on the end goals of the client.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

PwC Experience Centers’ principal objective is to bring together customers and businesses in dynamic spaces to establish business models that incorporate user feedback at all design stages. In occupying this intermediary role, Experience Centers help identify user needs and the root causes of customer dissatisfaction through co-creation processes so the resulting business model used by the client satisfies needs of end-users. This open-innovation environment attracts private companies and public organizations looking to modernize and transform the business-consumer service delivery relationship. Their human-centric nature makes these spaces distinct and helps concentrate varied perspectives and problem solving tactics in a central meeting location. In joint collaboration with other stakeholders, PwC helps clients rethink their mission and generate innovate business models to meet end users’ needs. By asking questions centered on how to alter current business practices for greater customer satisfaction, clients can identify areas for growth and ultimately find a new path forward. The PwC promoted business models are considered innovative, especially for the public sector, given that they reconfigure the model to meet new objectives established based on consumer input. Thus, by enabling conscious changing of an existing business model or the creation of a new business model, clients can strategically elevate models to better satisfy the needs of the customer. The associated organizational structures and methods for service/product delivery reflect a shift in mindset of the client and focus on impact and growth.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Typically, larger organizations have more rigid organizational hierarchies and learned cultural habits, which can make implementation of flexible methodologies difficult. The objective of the PwC Experience Centers are to function as testbeds and incubators for entrepreneurial design thinking and help PwC evaluate hybrid/agile managerial approaches to public sector challenges, in-house. By having the Centers operate in this way, PwC can overcome organizational challenges and share niche-consulting expertise gathered through Center activities to internal PwC consultants. This sort of ‘Agile Desk’ unit of PwC is transformative for internal work cultural – both enhancing workflow and teaching nuanced strategies for managing client relationships. There is a tri-fold benefit from PwC Experience Centers as clients, their customers, and PwC, learn and improve from the co-creation sessions and find solutions to broad, complex problems.

Transferability & Replicability

The PwC Experience Centers can also serve as intermediaries and network enablers between actors that have struggled to communicate productively. According to researchers James Stewart and Sampsa Hyyaslo in their analysis of the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technology, intermediary organizations, such as PwC, configure the users and involved actors yet maintain a position of separation from the decided end use of the technology. This enables intermediaries to influence through workshops and co-creation sessions, however, the participants have the final decision-making power. Thus, as an intermediary PwC drives the new partnerships through six key “bridging activities” (Bessant and Rush 1995):

Articulation of needs, selection of options
Identification of needs, selection training
Creation of business cases
Communications, development
Education, links to external info
Project management, managing external resources, organizational development

When broken down further, it essentially tasks the intermediary with enabling transfer of knowledge, sharing knowledge across the user community, brokering to a range of suppliers, and diagnostic/innovation – trying to identify what end users actually want. These tasks are driven by three main social learning roles occupied by the intermediary: facilitators, configurers, and brokers. In the PwC context, Experience Centers are living out these archetypes as they bridge gaps between customers, companies, and the public sector. In practice, we have seen the importance of PwC occupying this intermediary role and facilitating critical client-customer interactions at the Centers. Contamination of approaches between the private and public sectors, knowledge transfer, and elevated understanding of shared challenges are just a few of the benefits in having PwC as an intermediary network enabler.

Success Factors

Social learning and/or contamination of techniques/approaches during interactions at PwC Experience Centers is another key way that public value is realized. Social learning refers to two simultaneous, complementary, and intertwined processes: innofusion (Fleck, 1988) and domestication of technology (Sørensen, 1996). Fleck defines innofusion as the innovation that takes place during the diffusion of new technology amongst participants. In this phase, users discover their needs and wants through a process of technological design, trial, and exploration. The other component, domestication of technology, addresses the pre-existing “heterogeneous network of machines, systems, routines and culture.” Essentially, it recognizes how cultural consumption habits influence user behavior and underlines the value of incorporating users’ creativity in product design processes. For PwC Experience Centers, a transfer of co-creation approaches and design thinking techniques to its participants is valuable for ensuring sustainability of solutions and enabling shared sponsorship to anticipate possible resistance to project implementation. Additionally, there is a cross contamination of techniques between participants as they originate from diverse backgrounds and bring to the workshops different views for how to solve problems. In this process, divergence in ideas and incorporation of distinct actors allows critical knowledge transfer that often precludes innovation and helps identify overlapping challenges. Outcomes generated from co-creation activities at the Centers have included the use of private sector business models by public organizations. By seeing the design elements of private sector models implemented by PwC, clients can interpret and apply similar structures in their own operations – thus initiating a transfer of proven strategies between private and public actors.

Lessons learned

Living Labs play a critical role in displaying the mutual value of co-creation approaches for public and private actors. In the public sector, there is a hesitancy to welcome consumer engagement throughout the service design process. Governments and public organizations are fearful that actively seeking consumer input is too cost and time intensive and are unaware of the potential benefits for engaging customers in the earlier design stages. Therefore, it is essential to understand the PwC Experience Centers’ role in helping enable public-private mutual understanding and fostering innovative co-creation solutions. They add value by acting as a platform for idea exchange between all actors, inciting and analyzing customer feedback, and promoting multi-perspective discourse. The resulting improvement in services and increase in public value benefit the supply-side and user-side equally, and substantiates the importance of intermediaries in opening communication channels. It enables organizations and companies to explore how to improve their own services and/or processes with consumer engagement as the central focus and at the Centers they can test, fail, retest, and optimize proposed strategies before actual implementation.

SIILAB – Hauts-De-France Region: A «Public Innovation Lab» for Digital and Social Inclusion

The SIILAB (Social Innovation and Investment Laboratory) is a «Public Innovation Lab» created in 2016 in the framework of a national call for project to foster the «Digital Transition of the State and Modernization of Public Action». The SIILAB was one of the twelve projects labelled as Public Innovation Labs in different regions. The raison d’être of the SIILAB is the digital inclusion in a region where a lot of people are poor or low qualified or unemployed or in scholar exclusion. Furthermore, digital exclusion (no digital device or illectronism) concerns 1,2 million people in the Hauts-de-France region (and 13 million in France). In the context of e-government and increasing e-administration, access to digital public services is a priority for public actors and social mediation actors. The SIILAB is an innovative answer to this political challenge. Even if 16 stakeholders were at the origin of this social innovation project, the DRJSCS (Regional Directorate of Youth, Sports and Social Cohesion) of the Hauts-de-France region (North of France) is the pilot of the Living Lab. As a resource centre for social innovators, the SIILAB is located in the antenna of the DRJSCS, in Lille. It is also considered as a “neutral meeting point” (a room with tools for design sessions) for stakeholders. As a methodology, the Living Lab is “a space and time of liberty” to experiment new practices in administrations. Above all, the SIILAB is a framework for actors of the social economy as well as public agents from the State or the local authorities to launch projects at the scale of the Hauts-de-France region. To improve social innovations and social economy, the work program of the SIILAB focuses on 7 axes : crowd-sourcing, simpler administrative procedures, illectronism, open data, e-learning, assessment, promotion of social innovations to grand public.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The SIILAB was created by the DRJSCS and 15 other founders, from the social economy (association networks, social entrepreneurs networks, R&D institute for transfer of social innovations, a regional research and training chair), decentralised directorates from State services (social security, employment, housing, family allowances, environment, energy, social economy, statistics) and national public financial institutions. The Regional Directorate of Youth, Sports and Social Cohesion is the node of a larger network of public and private stakeholders that were used to work together but wished to improve their collaborative practices to create new solutions for digital and social inclusion. Beneficiaries are citizens that need social aids or at least inhabitants far from digital transformation of public services.

Co-creation process

The SIILAB charter sets out methods in order to «foster the emergence of territorial innovations (and) the evaluation of the impact of social innovations». The methodology follows 3 phases: 1) Co-design of public policies with users for their real needs ; 2) Prototyping and test of solutions; 3) Project development with agile methods. Specific tools inspired from design methodologies are used, such as «Lego games» as Icebreaker between people who come from diverse institutions with different professional mindsets. Other tools and co-creative methods are powered by the DITP (a governmental service for the transformation of administrations). A small team of managers and limited-term employees are in charge of co-creative workshops in a dedicated room equipped with mobile tables, large screens and software often forbidden in the French administration. The SIILAB team is beta-tester for these software, creates fact sheets for users and diffuses innovations on social medias. The SIILAB is a space which favours interactions between administrations and their stakeholders, that allows the “right to fail” and a collaborative work based on agility and a non-hierarchical organisation. Even if the stakeholders are first interested by the SIILAB to experiment new digital tools rather than creative methodologies, the Living Lab helps stakeholders to change their work habits to foster innovative projects.

Digital Transformation Process

The role of the SIILAB in the digital transformation is twofold: 1) exploring impacts of the administrative dematerialization on public agents and in particular on social workers in the region; 2) finding solutions for the digital inclusion of inhabitants whatever their social level and the territory where they live. Indeed, the national program Action 2022 aims at 100% administrative dematerialization in 2022 and at reducing the number of public officials: Internet has to become the main access to public services. But what will be the consequences in a region with a lot of inequalities? The SIILAB is a Living Lab for helping public agents with new digital practices, not only in the dematerialization of administrative requests but also to co-create new procedures beyond paper forms removal. Collaborative workshops were organised on the themes of end-users (digital vulnerability, reception in social centres), digital training of social workers or about authorised software (licences, security, hacking). To reduce the negative impacts of digital exclusion on fragile populations, the SIILAB designed and prototyped an interactive map of all social centres or other institutions than can help beneficiaries in their digital administrative requests. According to a Living Lab approach, a first inventory of local initiatives to improve the digital accessibility to public services was realised, by students of the university. A prototype of the map was invented in co-creative sessions, then tested on an “interactive table” in the SIILAB at Lille during the national «Week for Public Innovation» (2018). Accessible on the web, the interactive map constitutes a new public service against illectronism. An incremental updating of the map (800 places in 2018, 1500 places in June 2019) and user-returns about quality and accessibility are also a type of “evaluation in progress” of this new digital public service.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The SIILAB is a tool for administrations to experiment new digital tools and work practices without the logic of signature books and with less political control than usual. As a public innovation Lab, the Lab managers are authorised to test disruptive rules for public procurement, such as the purchase of small equipment on the Amazon website or the use of a credit card. Thanks to the Living Lab, public agents can test online meetings or the national digital platform called “demarches-simplifiees.fr” (simplified processes) that helps public officials to co-product e-administration. As a Lab dedicated to social economy, social innovation and public innovation, the SIILAB is used by more than 150 public or private actors in the region. For transforming the SIILAB into “a network of networks”, the aim is to enlarge the audience of the Living Lab thanks to a mailing list of 1600 addresses (in 2019) of associations, local communities, State administrations, or through more than 1000 followers on Twitter. This social network is also used by the Lab managers to bypass the usual hierarchical communication with the ministries and elected people. Examples of outcomes are: a digital kit to train social workers in digital inclusion practices (access to social rights with Internet); a video prototype to explain «domiciliation in Social Centres»; an interactive map of places for digital inclusion not far from home (training, help of social workers to guide users in e-administration). The map has three aims: 1) helping inhabitants in their digital requests; 2) showing inequalities between citizens according to the territories where they live; 3) encouraging public authorities for improving the geographical diffusion of resource centres for e-administration.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

The SIILAB is a Public Innovation Lab managed by a State institution, the DRJSCS, under the authority of the Préfet (representative of the State authority in the regions). Even if a national call for project is a lever for public innovations, the change in administrative routines and the hierarchical top-down decisional process are real challenges. Another challenge linked to the call for project as a tool for public innovation is the short-term funding, too short to co-create with users and to prototype innovations. So, there is a gap between political discourses about co-creation and Living Labs (that need funds) and the national incentive for reducing public expenditure. According to the SIILAB experiments, a second bottleneck in transforming administrations is the digital process in itself. Cost, skills and data security can be barriers for the use of software in co-creative sessions with any public agent engaged in the digital transformation. And co-creation is not a priority when the digital transformation in public services implies more work to implement new software, new design and new rules (once only, easy to read and understand, etc.). Another barrier to the efficiency of Public Innovations Labs is that projects are based on partnership, too often based on engaged people but who could leave the experiment following changes in their careers.

Transferability & Replicability

The diffusion of the SIILAB experimentations is made by online social networks or through events “in the real world”, in the region or in France. From 2016, the SIILAB projected the scaling up of innovations at the regional scale, at the trans-border scale with Belgium and at a national scale through social economy networks. At a regional scale, the mapping of digital resource centres is a way of replicability in more and more local communities. At a national scale, other public innovations labs or social innovators come to visit the SIILAB in Lille in order to transfer some experiments. But considering the short time funding of the Living Lab, the uncertain future of the SIILAB makes it difficult to imagine the diffusion phase. Moreover, as a public innovation Lab created for the Hauts-de-France region, the SIILAB has no administrative authority to diffuse new public actions in other regions in France. These regions could just try to imitate the SIILAB, but probably in the limited framework of a call of project. A way to get around this obstacle was the participation of the SIILAB to the creation of a «Connected France Hub», a regional hub of public and private actors for digital inclusion (national call for projects from the “Bank of the Territories”). Linked to the national incentive for creating Living Labs in the public services, replicability of Public Innovation Labs as tools for administrative transformation goes also through a MOOC developed with the Sorbonne University in Paris to explain how to create a Public Innovation Lab.

Success Factors

For the government that launched projects for transformation of public action, the criteria of success are: cost-savings in public expenditure, a better quality of public services for users, a better work environment for public agents, an innovative digital project, the quality of governance. For the SIILAB, additional success factors are: an increased organisational performance, the learning of collaborative practices, a better implementation of public policies, new services for vulnerable people (poor, elderly, undergraduate, immigrants…). Moreover, SIILAB managers consider as a success the visibility of the social innovations by the Préfet (representative of the State in the regions) and by the government in Paris. Success criteria of the SIILAB were measured in 2019: more than 150 stakeholders; more than 3050 persons participated in 310 workshops or events (more than 200 participants in November 2018); 50 projects launched; 1600 persons in the mailing list; more than 1000 followers on Twitter and around 25 000 views per month; national prices as indicators of recognition and efficiency (Télécoms Innovation 2018, Best innovative strategy 2018). But a success factor to achieve these success criteria was the SIILAB capacity to reinforce the previous habits of decentralised State services to work together, as well as with the public and private actors of the social economy, including associations, universities and local authorities.

Lessons learned

The role of the SIILAB, as a Public Innovation Lab supported by the French Government, is to experiment digital tools and co-creative methods, often inspired from service design. Public Innovation Labs are elements of a national policy that aims to restore the legitimacy of public action by responding to three objectives: a social issue (linked to digital change), a budgetary issue (cost-savings), a governance issue (Public, Private, People Partnership). The specificity of the SIILAB is focused on social innovation and digital inclusion in a region where a lot of vulnerable people are far from e-administration. Its governance (a committee for strategic decisions, a self-organised partnership for actions, a regional networking) is one model among others in Public Innovation Labs. Introducing the Living Lab methodologies in a bureaucratic organisation allows the “right to fail” and new relations between State administrations, local public agents and private stakeholders (no subsidies but funds for a collective project). But some bottlenecks appeared through the SIILAB or other Public Innovation Labs: 1) co-creation with intermediate-users (public agents, associations) and not final vulnerable users; 2) when an innovative practice becomes a norm, it is more difficult to quantify how it changes public action; 3) it is difficult to evaluate the costs avoided by co-creation; 4) a short-term funding (2 or 3 years) does not allow to test innovations and change practices; 5) the Anglo-saxon model of «impact measurement» does not allow to evaluate the collective value creation (Commons).